Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/134

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

120 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

his customary mode of regarding all life from the "economic" stand- point ; he sees in an inspired moment that we are no longer mere animals, and that sociology is not a branch of biology; that it takes the ideal to blow the dust off the actual and lead men even to a cleaner sty.

"The existence of specific duties and the recognition of them, the spirit of self-sacrifice, the moral law and the reverence for it in its most abstract and absolute form, all no doubt presuppose society ; but society, of a kind to render them possible, is not the creature of appe- tite and fear, or of the most complicated and indirect results of these." To this conclusion of T. H. Green every man is forced who really makes an exhaustive analysis of social forces and seeks to change for the better the economic conditions of mankind. The "economic man " is man ; not a brute all compact of appetite and fear, but* an intelligence which can respond to the words justice and pity. It would have clarified Loria's argument if he had frankly made this apparent at the beginning and not dragged it in through stress of need at the end. C. R. HENDERSON.