580 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
toms of indifference to these tendencies, but they have disappeared in the revision.
I admire the book so unreservedly that I have little respect for myself when casting about for the reviewer's inevitable qualifica- tions. It seems to me that it can be dispraised only by taking a standpoint outside of the modern thought-orbit. If it ever in sub- stance falls out of date, it will be through the passing of our present Zeitgeist. .Some day the pendulum may swing back, and men may find themselves saying : "Social control is well enough as far as it goes, but it is after all a superficial way of representing the ultimate facts of indi- vidual reaction." This is surely not the present consensus. The immanence of the social is the modern note. The method of that ascendency has never been so objectively analyzed as in Social Control.
ALBION W. SMALL.
The Nature of Man: Studies in Optimistic Philosophy. By ELIE METCHNIKOFF, Professor at the Pasteur Institute. The English Translation edited by P. CHALMERS MITCHELL, Secretary of the Zoological Society of London. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. xvii+3og. $2. WITH the possible exception of Haeckel's Riddle of the Universe, this book, both through the author's misfortune and his fault, is the clearest instance I could cite of unscientific science. In the first place, there is sharp internal disagreement between author and editor. The former is quoted as saying : "If it be true that man can- not live without faith, this volume, when the age of faith seemed gone by, has provided a new faith, that in the all-powerfulness of science" (p. vii). Perhaps the author has elsewhere exceeded the bounds of propriety to that extent, but the nearest approach to the proposition which I can find in this volume is its closing paragraph, viz.: "If there can be formed an ideal able to unite men in a kind of religion of the future, this ideal must be founded on scientific principles. And if it be true, as has been asserted so often, that man can live by faith alone, the faith must be in the power of science" (p. 302). Charity de- mands that the latter formula be taken as the author's version. Again, the English editor and the publishers have given the translation a form and a recommendation that stimulate expectations which the author carefully guards against. The present version bids also for the attention of an entirely different public from the one that the author expressly addresses. He refers to his book as "hypotheses"
