352 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
abominations. They have the same ideal as the anarchist, it may be, but it is not law and government themselves, but rent, or interest, or profit, or all of them together under the general head of the individual ownership of capital, that is to blame. They are the kind of people who stand as "independent" candidates and go to make up independent parties. What they may do or become in the future, when they have got into touch with fact, it would be vain to prophesy. In the meantime they strike one often as impractical, and sometimes as worse. And the reason is that they are abstract thinkers in the sense described. Their ideas are not in touch with reality at any point at which force may be profitably exercised with a view to improving upon it in the direction of their ideal. They have too great a contempt for what actually exists to hold parley with it at any point. "Things are all wrong." The whole established fabric of society is rot- ten. There is not even a sound plank on which they can stand to begin the task of setting it right, and so they are apt either to fall back into the ranks of the unemployed politician, the writer, and agitator and do nothing at all ; or, if they set their hand to what other people are doing, to be an incalculable and unreliable element, the despair of their friends and the derision of their enemies.
Shakespeare, who knew everything, knew of this type and the trouble they might be to themselves and others in the pursuit of their ends.
" Fie on't, O fie," says Hamlet, "'tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed ; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely."
" The time is out of joint ; O cursed spite That ever I was born to set it right."
A great deal has been written and said about the source of Hamlet's ineffectiveness. Some have attributed it to his " native irresolution," others to a deep-rooted pessimism, others to his so-called madness. In this difference of learned opinion, perhaps I may be permitted to claim him as a case of an abstract thinker of the kind I am speaking of. He has noble views of things in
