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very decided judgment in the negative upon both points. While I can offer no important suggestions toward the improvement of the book for its purpose, if its doctrine is scientifically tenable, and if it belongs in the undergraduate stage of study, my belief is very firm that neither supposition is correct. In the author's judgment it would be wise to devote a large part of the time available for the social sciences to study under guidance of this text-book (p. vi). My dissent from this judgment is a consequence of my belief that the subjects to which the book is devoted are not yet under control of the human mind as ascertained knowledge. The contents of the book are, therefore, hypotheses in didactic form.
So long as any subject-matter is in the hypothetical stage, it is bad pedagogy to give it dogmatic expression in the undergraduate course. Professor Giddings has given to his doctrine as authoritative expression as though it had passed out of the region of uncertainty, and had established itself as unquestionable reality. This is simply not the case. The subject-matter is for that reason not suitable, in this form at least, for the undergraduate curriculum. As between this book and courses appropriate to undergraduate stages of maturity in anthropology, ethnology, history, economics, civics, psychology, logic, and ethics, I would go beyond Professor Patten's somewhat startling statement before the American Economic Association several years ago: "No sociologist ought to be admitted to any college faculty without the consent of the economists." I would amend by substituting for " the economists" "all the members of the faculty who believe that there is such a thing as a rational correlation of sciences and a necessary integrity of science." Sociology has no competence to speak in advance of these sciences, except as to iht forms of knowledge about society. It were vastly better for teachers with the sociological point of view to fill up the undergraduate time with either or all of the studies named, than for anyone, under supposed license of sociology, to lead undergraduates into such a very largely speculative "study of the nature and laws of human society " as this book contains. The form in which theorizing about society is put in this book must inevita- bly tend to create in the minds of immature students the impression that there is a sociological system of doctrine about " the nature and laws of human society," not composed out of the specific truths dis- covered by ethnology and history and comparative politics and psy- chology, but outside of, in addition to, and partly in antithesis with, the concrete or less generalized truths ascertained by these sciences.
