special social sciences. They furnish the materials out of which the sociological edifice is constructed. Among these sciences the author enumerates the following: social or, as the geographers are beginning to call it, human geography, a study of the physical environment in its relations to social groups; demography, a study of populations, their numbers, distribution, and the phenomena which determine them; ethnography, the study of races; finally that "very recent science" sometimes called social morphology, which is concerned with the study of social groups within the limits of the nations, i.e., professions, classes, associations. These are special sciences which describe the physical structure of society. On the other hand, there are the special sciences concerned with human relations as they exist within the limits of this physical structure. These are economics; ethnology, the science of custom, "of which the study of family life is a branch"; the science of religions; the history of the sciences, letters, and the arts, the science of law and the history of right; political science.

Sociology stands in relation to the special social sciences in the same relation that cosmology does to the special physical sciences or that biology does to botany, zoology, and natural history. In short, sociology, according to Worms, with certain modifications and refinements, remains what it was for Comte and Spencer, not science in the sense that physics or psychology are sciences, but a philosophy.

To conceive sociology in these terms, however, is to ignore every recent movement and tendency in sociology outside of France and England. It takes no account, for example, of the writings of that very original and stimulating student of social life, the late Georg Simmel, whose sociology is the source and inspiration of a very enterprising new school of sociological thought in Germany. For Simmel and his followers sociology is neither history nor philosophy but an empirical science, since it assumes that the subject-matter of sociology is just those abstract and typical forms of association which, as crystallized in custom and tradition, may be described, classified, and eventually explained as the products of sociological processes-processes to which Simmel gives the very general name of social interaction.

An adequate statement of present sociological tendencies can hardly neglect the disposition of students to direct attention less to society and more to social groups. In these social groups the social processes operative in the evolution of humanity assume forms at once characteristic and definite, so that it is possible to analyze and describe them, even to experiment with them. Under these circumstances sociology tends to

assume the character of a natural science. It seeks to study social groups as the botanist studies plants or the zoologist studies animals.

These divergent tendencies represented, on the one hand, by the present volume and on the other by various expressions of individual European and American writers raise the question whether sociology will continue in the future to be what it has been in the past, namely, a social philosophy, an interpretation of life, a formulation of social programs, a council at once of prudence and of perfection, or whether it will seek to be what it has always professed to be a positive science, based on an empirical study of human nature-human nature as revealed in historical events, and as represented, on the one hand, in the customs, cultures, and traditional life of social groups and, on the other, in the personalities and characters of individual men so far as these are the product of social processes and so far as they are integral elements in the existing social organizations.

It seems that in the long run sociology, for practical as well as logical reasons, cannot continue to be both philosophy and natural science; it cannot at the same time define our wishes and describe the facts of social life; it cannot at once tell us what we ought to do and what we can. There was a time, and not so long ago, when philosophy and history included within their circles all knowledge, whether of the physical or of the social universe. The individual sciences, however, as they succeeded in defining their points of view, delineating their several fields of observation and creating systematic methods for research, so that they were able not merely to formulate hypotheses but to test them, have invariably separated themselves from philosophy, with its practical, moral, and political interests, and have sought to describe and explain, rather than interpret, facts. The same motives which have brought this about in other fields seem likely to bring about the separation between social philosophy and social science. For the author of this volume, however, sociology is social philosophy.

ROBERT E. PARK

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Sociology and Ethics. The Facts of Social Life as the Source of Solutions for the Theoretical and Practical Problems of Ethics. By EDWARD CAREY HAYES, Ph.D., LL.D. New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1921. Pp. viii+354. $3.00. Professor Hayes has attempted in this volume something which is much needed to provide a firm, scientific basis for ethics. He rightly finds that basis in scientific sociology. His thesis is that knowledge of

the interdependent life of men will reveal the worth and meaning of life and will supply it with direction and motive, quite independently of theological beliefs or metaphysical theories. Not that Professor Hayes denies the value of religion for the ethical life; but he would have religion find its firmest root in the values of the social life rather than in metaphysical beliefs. He demands an ethics, and so by implication a religion, which grows up out of the facts of life rather than out of beliefs concerning a supernatural and transcendental world. Such an ethics will be sociological and will take the natural science view of life for granted. It will recognize causation in the moral world not less than in the physical world. It will cordially accept the results of modern science, and will find the motives to righteousness in human nature and in the social process. In brief, it will seek guidance in the facts of life, not in the facts of an imaginary world. Its goal will be not some abstract conception of the right, but human welfare. Hence it will center upon the problem of "the good for man."

Such, in briefest outline, is the content of this courageous and interesting book. That its views will cause protest in some quarters is to be taken for granted, but that the author is right in his main thesis no sociologist, at least, would dispute. An ethics and a religion which grow out of the facts of life as interpreted by modern science are indispensable for the moral progress of our world, and sociology should aid in constituting them. Professor Hayes has done valiant service in doing his part along this line.

It is all the more to be regretted, therefore, that at times his phrasing is apt to lead to grave and probably needless misunderstandings. One of his chapters, for example, is headed "The Residuum of Faith." But surely Professor Gerald Birney Smith is more nearly right when he contends that the world revealed by modern science is richer in the possibilities of faith than the old supernaturalistic world ever was. This Professor Hayes would probably not deny, only he would express the idea differently. Again he would reject the idea of "free will" and substitute for it the notion of universal determinism, or determination of behavior by antecedent causes. However, Professor Hayes does not deny the "causal efficiency of ideas," but on the contrary emphasizes it. Yet many modern freedomists mean precisely this in their defense of the doctrine of free will. They mean by freedom, in other words, psychic, or rather rational, determination. Since William James, causeless freedom has found few advocates; but many still hold to a belief in psychic causation, that is, that the psychic element has causal efficiency in the world of our experience.

The mind of man has "shied like a frightened horse" not at the idea of determinism, and especially not at the idea of self-determinism, but rather at the belief in a mechanical determinism which is universal and which logically precludes human intelligence and choice from being real factors in controlling any situation. The issue is not "causeless freedom" versus "determinism," but psychic determination versus mechanistic determination in terms of the laws of mechanics. This the author does not make quite clear; and it is to be regretted, as it seems certain to the reviewer that he does not mean to endorse the idea of a rigid universe controlled simply by mechanical laws. On the contrary, he constantly emphasizes the spiritual or psychic nature of the social process, and so of all that is involved in the moral life. If rightly understood, therefore, there are no concessions in this book to a materialism masquerading as modern science. It is rather an attempt to show that the ethical and the social are, at bottom, the same thing; and as Professor Hayes himself says, they both are spiritual, but not on that account outside of the realm of law.

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI

CHARLES A. ELLWOOD

New Homes for Old. By S. P. BRECKINRIDGE.

‘Americanization Studies." New York: Harper & Bros., 1921. Pp. xx+356. New Homes for Old is the sixth in the series of ten studies in Americanization which the Carnegie Corporation has made. The purpose which Miss Breckinridge states she had in making the study, and which runs through the entire discussion, is how the immigrant woman can be helped in the adjustments which must be made in the whole family organization when she moves from Eastern or Southern Europe to America.

The problem is set out clearly and sympathetically in the chapters on "Family Relationship," "The Care of the House," "The Problems of Saving," "The Neglected Art of Spending and the Care of the Child." The material for this analysis was secured from social agencies which deal with the foreign born; from leaders of the various national groups who have passed through the process of adjustment and can look back on their own experience as well as they can see what is going on around them in the families of more recently arrived immigrants; from illustrative schedules obtained from women who might be said to have passed through the first period of adjustment; and finally by a study, in typical mining, industrial, and agricultural settlements, of the organized efforts of the immigrants themselves through consumers co-operatives, fraternal societies, building and loan and other associations to solve their own problems.

"In the old Country," Miss Breckinridge points out, "the mother knew what standards she was to maintain, and had the backing of a homogeneous group to help her." Here she discovers only little by little the standards by which her success as wife or mother will be measured in the United States. The transition from one standard to another involves a great difference in the position of the wife and the children in relation to the authority of the husband and father and a change from the old self-sufficient economic unit of which she was a part at home to complete dependence on a money wage; from the simple village housekeeping with the restricted vegetable diet which the farm supplied, to new types of houses, new kinds of clothes, the demand for American cookery, and the maintenance of new standards of cleanliness under conditions which make the old standards almost impossible to maintain. New standards of behavior and new methods of discipline for the children add to her confusion. Finally, there is the fact that the immigrant woman's husband usually belongs to the lowest wage group in the country and it is therefore important that she should not have to learn all these things by the expensive trial-and-error method.

All these facts, suggested in other discussions of the immigrant, have never before been analyzed and set out so that the American student of social problems, and especially those who are trying to work with these women or with their children, could see that real headway can be made only by fitting our own changing and developing social customs into the background of the form of family organization and the social traditions which are rooted in the disappearing isolation of peasant life in Eastern or Southern Europe.

In the great majority of families, Miss Breckinridge points out, the change is accomplished gradually and unconsciously with the help of earlier immigrant neighbors who seem completely American to the newcomer, with the help of and sometimes confused by the rapidly Americanizing children, sometimes with the help of and sometimes in spite of the husband whose contacts with the outside world are more numerous. Only now and then does she have the help of an understanding American. For American agencies usually have little contact with the immigrant until some misfortune comes. To help her then, the social worker must understand the starting-point and the road which the woman and her family have travelled. In her concluding chapter-"Family Case Work"-Miss Breckinridge lays especial emphasis on the equipment which is necessary for successful work under these circumstances.