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principles at his finger-ends. Take one subject, statistics. I think all social reforms, if they are to bear good fruit, must be based on well-weighed and welldigested statistics. The census returns, and the returns of births and deaths, might save us from many wild projects of reform. Our statistics at present are very inadequate. They could be indefinitely improved. They could be treated by able mathematicians to yield very good results, and enable us to see in what direction we should endeavor to move.

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D: I think we have scarcely borne sufficiently in mind that Mr. Branford was not here. I think his speech was choke full of knowledge which he designates in a very fine little phrase - "The scaffolding of life." We must remember, I think, that whatever subject is taken, a writer must take one particular phase or side of it the side that he sees; and we must expect it to be only a limited view. Especially of big subjects it must be so. And don't think it altogether amiss, because we get, as in this case, a lot of knowledge we should not get in the ordinary way.

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I think we amateur sociologists ought to take heart of grace and feel that we are engaged in a very useful purpose. I never understood before so clearly what sociology was. We call ourselves "The London Sociological Society," and we vaguely understood the term; but, as we have had it put very tersely by Mr. A, there is more theory than practice. I remember that when we were founding the society, it was distinctly stated that we did not intend to be constructive in any way as a society. But I know that, in my own case, there was the idea that the society would lead to something definite apart from itself— that, as Mr. A said, we should touch the soul.

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I think what is wanted is the general dissemination of knowledge. should not be a few people who know a lot and a number of men of action who do not know where they are going. As Englishmen we have always had the energy and physical "go," but not the science. And, therefore, if even in a small way, I think if we can turn out more workers, the society will really have done the work it was intended to do.

E: I do not intend to have much to say in criticism of the paper, as Mr. Branford is not here. I content myself with saying that Mr. Branford has started far too soon in finding founders of sociology. The science is in its infancy, and sociology is surely the codifying of knowledge in relation to society; and this has never been attempted until very recently. I do not think he should have started quite so early.

F: I think there is one thing that struck me in the paper, and that was the relation which the writer made between sociology and religion. Mr. A, in his criticism, made an antagonism between them, but it seemed to me that sociology is essentially a spiritual science - all that religion and spiritual things have developed out of society, out of the interrelation of human beings; and, therefore, sociology does include religion, for it is itself - it will be the religion of the future.

There was another way in which he touched upon the same point, when he spoke about the past and the present and the future; I mean that the prophets and the religious people of old always dealt with the same thing in a different way. They brought up all the instances of the past, and ranted to the people on the present, and prophesied about the future; but the prophecies did not, as a rule, come true. But sociology takes up the same subject and covers the same ground, and, I think, on the sociological basis we can argue more safely about the future than on the old religious ground.

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G: I think Mr. Branford was rather unfortunate in the title of his paper. The paper, in my opinion, was an exceedingly good one, containing a valuable amount of information. [Hear, hear!] And if he had called it Speculations on Sociology with Slight Reference to Condorcet," it would have been descriptive, and saved him from some of the severe criticism to which he has been subjected. Sociology is trying to find an explanation of the whole phenomena of life, seeing where they tend, and what really, from all sources of our knowledge, existence means. That, of course, is the most comprehensive of all sciences, and to follow it out in the scientific spirit means to supersede all previous methods means

to gather up the threads of a tangled skein, and to sift them out and see what purpose is fulfilled in them all.

With regard to the observation that Mr. A has made, I will say a few words before I sit down. He objects to science entirely and to sociology in particular. He specifically objects to sociology [No, I don't!], and says there is something mysterious, something that man cannot grasp. In fact, his speech was a plea for mysticism. I think that none of us here would be in favor of that idea. Mysticism, the school of mystics, has ever been antagonistic to science. They never get any farther. They always say there is something beyond you can never explore a safe position, but it does not help us very much in the progress of discovery.

In the French Revolution there were many people ready to die for ideals, but that has been true in the history of the world. That is not a proof that the ideals are true. You have to examine these ideals in the light of experience, history, reason, and logic, before you can turn them to any practical benefit. It recalled to my mind an expression of Lacordaire's in which he characterizes the expression liberty, equality, and fraternity" as "liberty to do what you please, equality with God, and fraternity with the devil."

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With regard to these various movements, these great movements of the human race, I might commend to Mr. A a very instructive book. It is entitled The Psychology of Suggestion. It is an extremely instructive book. Though I do not agree with much the author says, he shows the effect that suggestion has on the human race, and how this has been exemplified in many of the intellectual and other movements of the times. And he has arranged in the chronological table at the end all the great movements in mediæval times, to show one continuous effect of suggestion, and that in every age there has been some overwhelming idea occupying a nation's or a people's thought. And that has been the result of the suggestion on the people of the time. He goes into it from a hypnotic point of view and shows the sociological effect it has upon the people.

H: I would say a few words on science and religion. I read a very remarkable statement made by a follower of Spinoza. He said: Formerly we had the tyranny of the churches and priests, but now we have the tyranny of the scientific man. This is my experience too. I do not know who have done the more harm in the world, but there are many people who are as foolish as the church people, because they have unlimited trust in the scientific man. For instance, the agnostics and materialists, who trust men like Darwin and Buchner. They were great philosophers, but we must be careful not to put our full trust in any man or mortal. It is my experience that science cannot explain everything. I think materialism, as it is preached by Buchner and other great men, is declining, or dying out. I think we must be very careful, if we make any progress, that we do not make a pope of any man, whether a great philosopher or great naturalist, but that we always discriminate between man and man. In my opinion, the only way of coming to a good conclusion is that we not only apply our mind, but do not forget that we have a heart.

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1: Well, Mr. Chairman, if you want me to come among a company of mystics, I will come to a sociological society. I have heard tonight, from different gentlemen who have been speaking, an interpretation of the term sociology," and, as far as I can see, every man has a different interpretation to give. I do not see that there is any united thought or concentrated view to be learned from sociologists. I think it is a very false method to push truths on one side and to say you have to go to religion to find mysticism. I think the paper was a very clever paper, but I should say for busy men of this world the paper was altogether too long, that the words used were terribly technical, which, if the mystics here can understand, I confess I do not. And if we are to bring encyclopædias and dictionaries to interpret these words, I am afraid I must withdraw my name from the association. I came here with the object of learning, or imparting a bit of knowledge. If men speak to me in a language I cannot understand surely our English language is broad enough—why should it be that men should write in other tongues if they have a handle behind their name or if they have not? I think the highest state of education a man may be in is to use simple terms that all may understand.

Now, I just wanted to say that Mr. A's comments were very excellent. I think he was quote misapprehended by the gentleman on my left, when he stated that he (Mr. A) was opposed to science. I think he meant that there is something higher than the cold science of statistics, that there is beyond science a Being that is a spirit, and I call him God without shame, and that is all Mr. A believes in, and I believe in myself. At least I might believe in something more specific, if I were to state it. And the objection that these men mention in this paper Augustine and other men among them seems to involve the idea that Christianity is not progressive. I am a Christian man. I find I am far more progressive than very many men. What quotations I have heard men make here are generally inaccurate. A man here spoke about David. He said he chose a punishment that fell on his people instead of on himself. I remember that he could have chosen no punishment for himself. All three punishments offered by Jehovah would fall on the nation. I believe they were pestilence, the sword, and famine. There you see, there is an inaccuracy. And for another man to say that Christianity is not progressive is wide of the mark, because Christ was a sociologist in the true sense of the term, and I should be a true sociologist because I am a Christian man.

J: Regarding the paper, I can only agree with another speaker when he said it was unfortunately entitled "The Founders of Sociology." The writer hardly touched on the important work of sociologists, and of course he went too far back in the history of men. He need not have gone farther back than Comte, and he must out of sheer honesty have given some account of Giddings, of Harvard University.1

As regards sociology, it is, if anything is, capable of concise definition. It is an endeavor to discover the laws which govern society, or govern life, and to classify them. Regarding the observations of many speakers, if we are going to ignore one of the greatest forces in human life, I must say we are preaching sociology from a very peculiar standpoint. We must study religion, and we must try to estimate its power as we must study science to estimate its power. But if we start off with the prepossession that science is everything, then we must make no progress whatever. We must have specialists for the different forces and specialists for classifying their results. There is no reason why we should not have a society with one man specializing on religion, and another on science, and another on socialism; and when all the papers are collected, it is quite possible to get a mind with sufficient synthetical power to give a paper that would be a true sociological paper, that would be an approximation of the forces operating on society.

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K: So far as I was able to judge, I did not gather that Mr. Branford was wishing to exclude religion, and I am not sure that any of those who have spoken wish that, unless it were Mr. A. He certainly seemed to have a strong objection to science, and he showed how he despised science by speaking of it as 'dry science," "dry methods of science," and by saying that it could do nothing, and that the spirit could do everything. He did not give us his definition of "spirit," nor did he, beyond his dogmatism, tell us what the spirit had done. For my part, I do not see what Mr. A meant in referring to " spirit as being thought creative of action," that constituting all the good, all the progress that has been made. For my part, I do not see how that dogmatism can be upheld and conclusively proved, any more than the dogmatism that men of action have been responsible for everything and have been the people who have caused thought to be created. The two things must go together, as I understand life.

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The gentleman opposite to me, in his opening remarks, with which I had some sympathy, complained that he seemed to have fallen among mystics, and he objected accordingly. I agree with him so far as he made any expressions on mysticism, but then he went on to foist the term mystic upon persons who thought that great value was to be obtained from the study of statistics. He seemed to think that statistics made the mystic. The very opposite is the fact, and if there is a class of people who can be called mystics, it is those who speak 1 1 We must preserve this bit of local color! - EDITORS.

of spiritualities. And, therefore, although feeling in agreement with him in his opening remarks, I must express the strongest disagreement with his concluding remarks.

The Chairman: A Scotchman was once asked to define "metaphysics," and he said that "when a person tried to define what he didn't know to someone who did not understand, that was metaphysics." We have had a heterogeneous mass of opinion. In the present day, when specialization has become daily more acute, sociology is really the most imperative necessity of the time. I think we may congratulate ourselves on having had a paper very fertile in producing debate and very fruitful in thought, so far winding the biograph, as I was supposed to have got any ideas of it. [Laughter.]

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REVIEWS.

The School of Character in Prison. By PROFESSOR CHARLES R. HENDERSON. An address before the Chaplains at the National Prison Congress held at Louisville, Ky., 1903. Published in the Annual Volume of Proceedings.

THE address of Professor Henderson is encouraging to plodders in pursuit of prison science, because it is a recognition, from this high religious and educational authority, of the natural and rational, not solely the supernatural and miraculous, in moral reformations, because it must serve to jog along the tardy chaplains who too exclusively preach introspection, to the neglect of circumspection; and because it points indexically beyond the ideal of prison schools to what all prisons ought to be: each a school of character — good character.

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The author's first principle of methods, for such a school of character "a man must be taught to know what he ought to will" -implies, as he has already affirmed in the same address, that 'many prisoners have not practical moral discrimination." This view is confirmed by this writer's observations of prisoners; for of the many thousands so carefully examined none revealed a moral sense in connection with the crime, either preceding, perpetrating, or in retrospection. Such absence of moral discrimination should modify the common estimate of crimes and molar wickedness of criminals, and should teach us the probable uselessness of what the chaplains term "the direct appeal" when unsupported by a moral education. Sermonic appeals to the spiritual life must fail to persuade the multitude to what is virtuous and honorable; for it is not in the nature of the mass of prisoners to obey a sense of shame, nor to abstain from vicious things because they are disgraceful, since they live according to the dictates of passion and pursue their own pleasures and the means of gratifying them. Of what is honorable and truly pleasant they have no idea, inasmuch as they never had a taste for it. Good taste is essentially a moral quality—is subjectively good character; so that the school of character may well

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