the newspapers every day devote more than half their space to them. One would suppose that people would learn some time that tires, and railroad accidents, and mine disasters, and boiler explosions, and robberies, and defalcations, and murders, as well as elopements, liaisons in high life, seductions, and rape, were normal social phenomena after reading of every one of these and a hundred similar events every day throughout the course of a lifetime. But this enormous mass of evidence has no effect whatever in dispelling the popular illusion that such events are extraordinary, and the octogenarian whose eyesight will permit still pores over the daily news, as it is called, with the same interest as when he was a youth. There is nothing new in news except a difference in the names. The events are the same. It is this that Schopenhauer meant when he said that history furnishes nothing new, but only the continual repetition of the same thing under new names. And this is meant when we speak of generalization.[1]
This is certainly a search for a unitary principle which is more than what is ordinarily called generalization. Is not this analogous to an individual manifesting himself in various ways, but always remaining a unity, or viewing an individual from various aspects? And when the person feels this individuality and unity in the whole of societary phenomena, is it not just as I perceive myself as a family self, or as a college self, and all the time I feel the general unity over, above, and through it all? Is not Mr. Ward's society, which is a unity, a large individual which the finite person appreciates in the same way as my self of this moment appreciates my individuality, so that, after all, the subject-object experience is but transcended so that the two are felt as one? Mr. Ward calls this the discovery of law in history; but, as a matter of fact, is it not more than this, though he does not admit it? Does it not have implications that he would hardly like to admit?
When the sociologist holds the theory of a biological organism as the analogue of society as a whole, has he not so far forth departed from a strictly empirical point of view, and gone beyond his own descriptive experience or the experience of others? When he argues for a view of society as a whole as an organism, he no longer confines himself to individuals and institutions; and his form of argument is not one that can be called strictly scientific induction, but rests on rather vague analogies, so that it rests
- ↑ Ibid., p. 55.
