gratification of seeing his ideas, for which he had suffered unpopularity and abuse, recognized; but he had the greater satisfaction of looking back upon a life of spotless honor, undeviating in its sincerity and intrepidly true to truth where truth seemed to be. That a wave of popular sentiment might roll up to exalt part of what he stood for, he well knew; but he was fortified to expect that, in the complex play of human interests, the "mores" would presently swing off toward some new form of the irrational, or even back to the old follies again.
It is plain, from the evidence of these essays, that Sumner was always a sociologist, that is, he always reached out spontaneously to an interpretation of societal phenomena broader than the purely economic or political one. The issues attacked in these essays are approached with a breadth of vision which goes with a general science of society and not with any single one of its subdivisions. Nobody who has studied the science of society with Sumner ever has any doubts about there being such a science; what persuaded us that there was one, was the actual demonstration set before us in the classroom. There was something that appealed to us as superlatively vital and enthralling, but of which no antecedent discipline had given us more than an oblique glimpse. Until the memory of his breadth and inclusiveness of vision as to human reaction and motive has faded quite away, it will be an arduous task to prove to one of Sumner's students that there is no general science of society. No amount of mere formal analysis and intellectual fence-building can stand against demonstration.
Sumner was a path-breaker by nature and circumstance; but he had his impulsion, as is the way of men, from the hand of another.[1] To judge by his own comments, he derived from Herbert Spencer some such intellectual awakening as he later gave to many. But it is wrong and shallow to class Sumner
- ↑ There is, in the Popular Science Monthly for June, 1889 (pp. 261-268), a Sketch of William Graham Sumner, which is largely autobiographical and which deserves re-pub1ication. It touches upon several of the points noticed in this Introduction.
