NOTE ON WARD'S "PURE SOCIOLOGY." III.
NOTES I and II have dealt with earlier chapters of the book, which provoke inquiry of many sorts, but which do not contain the most important parts of the author's argument. When we reach Part II, "Genesis," we begin to deal with the substance of the author's thought. From this point so many questions are involved which lead into almost every department of knowledge, that fruitful discussion of it would require the co-operation of an army of specialists. This discussion must go on, and its results must in any event make the foundations of sociology more secure. Meanwhile it is in order to indicate the place which the book as a whole must occupy in the literature of sociology.
In the first place, Ward's system is the first considerable attempt by an original investigator of admitted competence equally in biology and in sociology, to generalize the cosmic process from its mechanical and organic beginnings to its most highly conscious manifestations in social order. Whether the system turns out to stand fire or not, it is a survey of the social process by a man who has found out through first-hand study that there is an underlying cosmic process. Social philosophers galore have taken this comprehensive fact on trust, and have used it faithfully. Here is a scholar whose outlook is that of a man who has interviewed the cosmic process for himself. The episode of human history neces- sarily falls into a different perspective in his view from that of a man to whom human affairs are all that is real, while the physical ante- cedents of society are virtually fable or rumor.
In the second place, Ward has given us a system, not disconnected dabs at social problems. Every competent reader of sociological litera- ture must have remarked the fragmentary character of its most notable books. Thin sections, snapshots, detached incidents, special classes of phenomena, hypotheses to explain abstracted elements among social factors, make up their contents. Here comes a Gulliver among the Lilliputians and assembles the litter of social concepts into a replica of the world-order. Men may say in a hundred years or so that the work was crude. They are not likely to deny that it was monumental, nor that one of the rare minds of our time produced it.
In the third place, this system is in the spirit which may perhaps be set down as the chief merit of Herbert Spencer. He did more than
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