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306 L. F. WAED'S DYNAMIC SOCIOLOGY. spreading it out over two solid and bulky volumes. In reality, however, he has gone so deeply into the matter, and has wrought out his theory so logically from first principles, that his book commands respect not merely as a complete and fully-rounded social philosophy of its own sort, but also as a curious piece of strictly original and independent thinking. What with the ordinary prophets of education is a pious opinion, is with Mr. Ward a logical conclusion, as rigorously deduced from given premisses as a proposition of Euclid. In fact, this very rigour is at once the great charm and the great stumbling-block of the book : on the other hand, it preserves the author at every step from needless digression or rhetorical display, but on the other hand, it leads him into an excessive and inordinate schematism, accompanied by its usual concomitant of needless neology, or at least of a technically limited and crabbed terminology. The book begins with an introductory chapter, in which this central idea of a Dynamic Sociology an art of progress based on the science of man and the other less complex sciences is clearly sketched out : and the province of that art is summed up as "to overcome these manifold hindrances to human progress, to check this enormous waste of resources, to calm these rhythmic billows of hyperaction and reaction, to secure the ra- tional adaptation of means to remote ends". The introduction is succeeded by two historical chapters on the philosophic systems of Comte and of Herbert Spencer, which are really quite unnecessary in their actual context, and only serve to swell a very big book to still bigger dimensions. True, they illustrate the way in which Mr. Ward himself arrived at his own theories, and so they are of a certain personal genetic value to him, no doubt : but they contain little more than a resume of what every one of Mr. Ward's readers doubtless already knows the Philosophic Positive and the System of Synthetic Philosophy. Our author, however, seems to us to do scanty justice to Mr. Spencer, and greatly to underrate his own indebtedness to all his works, especially the essay on Education. His summary of Mr. Spencer's position will probably be read with some amusement on this side of the Atlantic : " Mr. Spencer has steadfastly declined to be drawn by his logic into anything that even the most incredulous could call a vagary. No man probably ever wrote as much as he has written without saying more that the average judgment of mankind could not indorse as soon as presented. This is due to the firm manner in which his reason is enthroned, and the all-sided and practical wisdom with which his extensive information enables him to survey every problem, But it is just these qualities that render him un- systematic, non-constructive, and non-progressive. Paradoxical as it may sound, and whether it be construed as complimentary or otherwise, Mr. Spencer has too much good sense and too much real knowledge to build a perfect system of philosophy." The words we have ventured to italicise are certainly curious as applied to one of the best-abused and most vilified of all philosophers, ancient or modern.