REVIEWS.
Social Theory. A Grouping of Social Facts and Principles. By John Bascom. T. Y. Crowell & Co., pp. xv+550. $1.75.
This book is full of a pedagogical sententiousness that may be serviceable in teaching undergraduates, but it necessarily exposes its author to the distrust of his peers. A writer may express opinions upon difficult questions in such decisive form that doubt is created about his right to any opinion at all. An author may pass judgment upon so many difficult questions in succession that readers are made to query whether the profoundest investigations of any of them can have been taken into the calculation.
The first suspicion which the table of contents creates is that unwarranted liberties have been taken with the term Sociology. The five parts into which the volume is divided profess to treat in turn of "Customs," "Economics," "Civics," "Ethics," and "Religion," each "as a factor in Sociology." In no single instance has the treatment conformed to the title. The factors named have been treated almost exclusively in their relations to social action, which is an entirely distinct affair. The nearest approach to any exception is in the division on Economics, but even here the fault remains.
The second suspicion is that in the use of the terms just mentioned the author has fixed on a very superficial classification of "forms of organic force," which he deals with as though they were different kinds of organic force. He nowhere penetrates below the surface to discover the nature of the energy which operates through these forms. He does not seem to realize that "customs," for example, are not separable from the other "forms," except in degree. He has built his whole treatment upon a division according to external traits of social actions, instead of discovering the radical principles of actions.
It is perhaps not surprising that the author treats of the family under the head of "customs." When we find, however, that in the same division he treats of "The Negro Problem," "Amusements," "Reform," and "The Press," we begin to question, if we did not
