Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/429

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REVIEWS 415

would even have a technique of invention and discovery. He deplores the fact that there is "no recognition of invention as a discipline" and "no text-book .... on invention in general" (p. 495).

The biological homologue is the "sport" (p. 240). His own term is "social innovation," which he prefers to "invention" (Tarde), "impulse" (Patten), "instinct of workmanship" (Veblen), etc. He enumerates the following sources of innovation :

In the first place, he mentions caste, slavery, and other sources of inequalities among men giving rise to a leisure class as an important instance of the principle of innovation. The conquering race became the leisure class. Other influences, especially the sacerdotal, contrib- uted to the same end. Individuals of this leisure class became respon- sible to a great extent for social innovations. The author curiously traces this impulse to the attempt to escape ennui.

Moreover, with the beginning of settled community life and the indvidual, instead of the communal, possession of property, the indi- vidual tends more and more to be the medium of social progress. Only relatively late in social evolution can the individual be said to have become the instrument of social advance, and it is not wholly true now. The social forces are still predominantly unconscious and generic rather than reflective and individual. But the rise of reflective thought, the bringing to consciousness of the method or technique of social action, which, of course, could only take place in the conscious- ness of individuals, i. e., only in the psychical sphere, has brought the psychic individual into the foreground as the chief instrumentality from now on through which social achievement will be won.

The spheres of romantic and conjugal love are ranked high in the scale of social innovations, as also the so-called anti-social emotions of jealousy and revenge.

The spiritual forces are the only positively socializing forces because they alone are egoistic, psychic ; they alone are truly socio-

genetic.

H. HEATH BAWDEN. VASSAR COLLEGE.

Le probleme du dtterminisme social: Dtterminisme biologique et

dtterminisme social. By D. DRAGHICESCO, membre de la

Societe de Sociologie. Paris: Editions de la Grande

France, 1903. Pp. 99. Fr. 2.50.

RECOGNIZING the necessity of a demonstrated theory of social

determinism as the basis of social science, the author of this book