676 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
that not all Americans vacillate on this essential point. I may also be allowed to quote one Old World author, of whom fate has so recently and tragically robbed us, and this from the last book he ever wrote, the one he referred to as his Schwanen- gesang, and which he probably never saw after it issued from the press. I refer to the posthumous little Sozialphilosophie im Umriss of Ludwig Gumplowicz, a copy of which reached me on November 22 last through the kindness of his son. Dr. Wladyslaw Gumplowicz, of Vienna. On pp. 6-9 of this work he says:
We live in the state and in society; we belong to a social circle which jostles against its members and is jostled by them; we feel the social pressure from all sides and we react against it with all our might; we experience a restraint to our free activities and we struggle to remove it; we require the services of other men which we cannot do without; we pursue our own interests and struggle for the interests of other social groups, which are also Our interests. In short, we move in a world which we do not control, but which controls us, which is not directed toward us and adapted to us, but toward which we must direct and adapt our- selves
Modern science knows the laws according to which the heavenly bodies move; it knows the laws of life of all organic beings; it knows the laws of the attraction, repulsion, and combination of atoms. What does it know of the social world? Nothing. In the world-conception of modern science this most distinctive human world is absent. There is no trace or intimation even of the laws of its movement in the prevailing philosophy
of nature. This world does not exist for it That the will of man
is controlled by his social environment, by the social group to which he belongs, in which he inheres and must inhere, that this influence is so exactly determined that we can calculate in advance the decisions of the wills of individuals from their social position and group attachments — of all this the modern philosopher of nature takes no notice; these factors which the phenomena of will call forth, do not exist for him. He knows only the organico-physical forces which set the human will in motion, The social environment of man with its impulses and suggestions, its coercion and compulsion, which determine the wills of individuals, these "forces" are as unknown to him as is the social world itself.
This final message of the author of the Struggle of Races fittingly supplements the splendid presentation by Dr. Ross of
Ibid., Vol. XV, November, 1909, pp. 412, 413.
