Ii8 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
exist in the same mind side by side with a eudaimonistic standard of conduct. People are fortunately inconsistent when it -comes to the application of the so-called absolutist standard of conduct.
But the conclusion that the author draws from these facts, namely, that the standards of the group have relatively little to do with the standards of the individual finds little justification either in the evidence here presented or in the resuts of investigations in genetic psychology.
The author recognizes this fact partially when he raises the question (p. 56) whether the existence of the welfare standard in the minds of the students may not itself be due to the existence of such a standard in the influences to which they have been r.ubjected. And he makes a rather unsuccessful attempt to escape from the difficulty thus presented. Thus he says (p. 57) that they could not have received their standard from their religious teachers, since the latter, both Protestant and Catholic, constantly employ non-utili- tarian standards. But fortunately the religious teachers of our gen- eration are inconsistent enough to teach better than they think. Alongside all the so-called absolutism of moral standards in modern preaching has gone a delightfully inconsistent appeal to common sense utilitarianism. And to deny the existence of a eudaimonistic standard in the current public opinion in which the students were reared, would invalidate the very thing upon which the author bases the value of his study, namely, that the students examined are representative of current public opinion.
It is of course the work of the genetic psychologist to trace out the exact relation of the individual consciousness to the social con- sciousness, and the process by which the individual comes to be rep- resentative of the life in which he is reared. But that the relation is most intimate and that there are not two sets of consciousness, a public opinion and an individual opinion, seems to be pretty well established. Professor Sharp seems to beg the whole question for a contrary conception. Cecil C. North
DePauw University
A Primer of Socialism. By Thomas Kirkup. London ; Adam and Charles Black. 1908. Pp. 90. A convenient and popular sketch of socialism by a sympathetic critic. C. R. H.
