sense, his " logical process of social development " ceases entirely to be an attempt at genetic explanation.[1] It does not offer a clue to the actual motivation of social development. It simply shows how the course of human actions might have been recommended to the reflective in advance, if anybody had been able to see future events in the same light in which they present themselves to Dr. Crowell now that they are past.
Perhaps the thoroughly artificial character of the whole discussion is still more evident in connection With the following passage (p. 155):
The four typal principles are : typal integration, typal differentiation, typal assimilation, and typal solidarity. . . . . These principles are, therefore, the causal relations which sociology,' like every other body of knowledge, finds it necessary to formulate.
That is, the author is not content to treat the most abstract general concepts as concrete realities. He posits them as efficient causes ! Scientific examination of facts cannot, of course, come within the scope of such a method. It reduces to dialectics pure and simple. Its naive assumption is that the categories which the mind must use in order to think the actual over again must be the factors which produced these realities {cf. pp. 172-3).
It may seem strange that so much space is given to a book that must be so seriously arraigned. The explanation is that the subject is important; it has received comparatively little treatment; and in spite of all that has been said, the author has made a certain contribution to the machinery of sociological investigation. If he had undertaken much less, his contribution might have been clear and available. His constant straining after expression of universalities impresses the reader as a symptom of incomplete acquaintance both with life and with science. Intimate knowledge of the relations generalized would keep most scholars from multiplying propositions that purport to epitomize all human experience. Dr. Crowell has floundered through a quicksand of speculation which he might have avoided by sharply distinguishing between a genetic explanation of society and the concepts which we find it useful to employ when we set in order and try to explain what we have learned about society. The book is the mouthpiece of "two voices;" the one trying to formulate the law of societary evolution, the other explaining "the logical processes especially appropriate for the investigation of social phenomena" (p. 5).
- ↑ This applies with equal force to the substance of Book III, The Sociological Axioms.
