New Homes for Old will be of really practical value to all the agencies and individuals who are working with foreign-born families. It should be much more than this. This series of Americanization studies was undertaken with the understanding that they would not end with a mere assembling of information, valuable as that always is, but that they would be made the basis of plans for assisting in the adjustment of the foreign born to his American environment. In this volume Miss Breckinridge has set forth not only the problem of the immigrant home-maker but a carefully worked-out plan under which existing national home economics agencies could be so related and developed as to be of help to the individual immigrant woman and all the local agencies that are concerned with the right solution of these family problems. The Rockefeller Foundation has found it possible to serve the world in two fields, (1) that of scientific research, and (2) that of making the benefits of their own and the discoveries of others available to individuals and communities whose needs, particularly in the health field, are peculiarly pressing. To fulfil if not the promise at least the hope which is raised by this volume, the social investigations which have been made by the Carnegie Corporation should be followed by the kind of help for which the Corporation itself through this study has established the need and pointed the road to service. May it perhaps be in order to suggest another inquiry into how the Carnegie Corporation can be persuaded of the opportunity for service to the United States which is before it, if it will make it possible for those who have the technique and the understanding to assist in removing the obstacles which prevent or delay those adjustments in the family life of our foreign-born neighbors which migration has rendered necessary. WASHINGTON, D.C. GRACE ABBOTT The Idea of Progress. An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth. By J. B. BURY. London: Macmillan & Co., 1920. Pp. xv+377. $5.50. Social Decay and Regeneration. By R. AUSTIN FREEMAN. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1921. Pp. xx+345. $5.00. Invention. The Master-Key to BRADLEY A. FISKE, LL.D. 1921. Pp. ix+356. $4.00. Progress. By REAR-ADMIRAL New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., A Philosophy of Social Progress. By E. J. URWICK. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 2d ed., 1920. Pp. ix +244. 75. 6d. Les Indices numériques de la Civilisation et du Progrès. By ALFREDO NICEFORO. Paris: Ernest Flammarion, Éditeur, 1921. Pp. 211. 4 fr. 50. The idea of progress as an intellectual conception is not modern. It was familiar to the Greeks although it did not interest them. A blind fate that avenges every excess was the conception that dominated their thought about life. In modern times, however, progress is no longer an idea merely; it is an article of faith, "the animating and controlling idea of Western civilization." It is the notion of progress in its rôle as "controlling idea" visibly directing and determining the conduct of men, rather than as a mere instrument of analysis and thought, that is the subject of Bury's inquiry. There are ideas, like liberty, toleration, equality, and socialism, which merely "express human aims and depend for their realization upon human will." There is, however, another order of ideas which play a great part in determining man's conduct but do not depend for their realization upon his will. These ideas involve questions of fact, and in so far as they cannot be proved, our attitude toward them should be one of faith. They are religious beliefs, although there may be no cult to support them and no formal creed to define and justify them. Progress is an idea of this sort. What Mr. Bury has written is a natural history of this idea, describing the circumstances under which it has gained its present widespread acceptance. As such this volume is an admirable illustration of the manner in which ideas can be studied, not merely logically, from the point of view of their validity, but objectively from the point of view of their pragmatic value and influence in social life. Of all that has been written on progress Mr. Bury's book is unquestionably the most interesting, illuminating, and convincing. The paradox of progress is represented by a society in which there is immense and rapid progress in detail while the values of life as a whole are steadily declining. It is this paradox which R. Austin Freeman has sought to elucidate in his volume Social Decay and Regeneration. Whatever one may have to say to the author's attempt at a solution of the problem, he has certainly stated it in a drastic and convincing form. It is, as Havelock Ellis says in his Introduction, "a book which will help us to realize along what road our civilization is at present moving." The author's thesis is that modern life, under the influence of modern science, has come so completely under the domination of social and industrial machinery as to destroy for the individual man most that makes life worth living. Just as every other living organism tends to produce, in the very process of growth, the toxins that limit its further development and eventually destroy it, so society tends to create by the very organization of the individuals that compose it an environment in which these individuals can no longer live. This would indicate that the society, like other organisms, was involved in a life cycle; that societies, in other words, are born, grow old, decay, and die. From this consequence the author seeks to escape upon the eugenist's theory that culture is an innate characteristic of race and that social progress is after all a matter of racial selection, i.e., breeding. The solution of the social problem is, therefore, the institution of a drastic system of biological selection. Instead of protecting the weak, the feeble-minded, and the unfit we must find means to weed them out and destroy them. Progress in short is not a sociological but a biological process. Rear-Admiral Fiske's Master Key to Progress is not so much a discourse on progress as a glorification of that mechanization of modern life which the author of Social Decay and Regeneration deplores. However, even in the admiral's optimistic perspective, there is a recognition that, while the society is making such admirable progress in details, there is something lacking in society as a whole. That these separate parts are handled well, the progress made in those parts convincingly testifies. Despite this, however, no book on invention would be complete which did not point out that the Machine, as a whole, is not being handled well. The trouble is the machine of civilization as a whole is being handled by demagogues and dilettantes instead of by experts, rear-admirals, eugenists, etc. In contrast with Mr. Freeman's conception of progress as a natural and biological process, Urwick's A Philosophy of Progress seeks to show that progress is moral and spiritual and consequently something essentially unpredictable and not to be described and explained in sociological or natural-science terms. Science and sociology, as distinguished from social philosophy, says the author in substance, may tell us what we can do, but cannot tell us what we should and must do. To put it plainly: if the medical expert tells me that this or that food affects the physical organs in this or that way, I accept his assertion. . . . But if the medical expert goes on to tell me that I ought or ought not to eat meat, I do not accept his ruling, any more than I accept that of the economist who tells me that we ought to stick to Free Trade or ought to discard it.' In the long run, decisions of what we ought to do are questions of philosophy and common sense, not of abstract science. They are questions of philosophy and common sense because they are, finally, not matters of technique or utility but of will, and our philosophy is nothing but a more mature and reflective expression of our wishes. Although progress has been made the subject of a vast literature very few attempts have been made to measure it. What are the criteria and what are the indices of progress? Les Indices numériques de la Civilisation et du Progrès is a little volume that seriously attempts to answer these questions, and this much may be said for it: If the answers it gives seem inadequate, the author has at least faced the problem and no one is likely to tell us how little we positively know about progress than the men who have tried to measure it. ROBERT E. PARK UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO Democracy in America. By JEROME DOWD. Oklahoma City: The Harlow Publishing Co., 1921. Pp. xiii+506. This book is little more than a compilation of excerpts from some threescore foreign and native writers on American life. The author's rôle is mainly that of editor, who, with a few introductory paragraphs, connecting phrases, and concluding sentences, has joined together selections on about twenty topics bearing on his subject. Take a generous portion from De Tocqueville, add a little Trollop, Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Muirhead, Bryce, Charles Wagner, or some other European writer who once visited us, top it off with a bit of Münsterberg, Van Dyke, or Cooley, as the needs may be, taking care to avoid our most virile students of democracy, and you have any one of the twenty-nine chapters in the book. He who reads this volume will put it aside with the feeling that on the whole it is a rattling of dry bones which have not been and indeed cannot be clothed with the flesh and blood of current life by their artful juggler. The reader will, perhaps, be struck with some of the author's comments, of which the following is typical: "Much of the crime in America is due to an extraordinarily strong moral sentiment. For instance, lynching is often the expression of a furious moral indignation" (p. 35). NEWELL L. SIMS AMHERST, MASS. E. J. Urwick, A Philosophy of Social Progress, p. 225, note. RECENT LITERATURE NOTES AND ABSTRACTS A TENTATIVE SCHEME FOR THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE LITERATURE OF SOCIOLOGY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES I. PERSONALITY: THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE PERSON 1. Biography 2. Original Nature: Instinct, Temperament, Racial Traits 3. Child Study 4. Social Psychology, Social Attitudes, and the Genesis of the Person II. THE FAMILY 1. The Natural History of the Family and the Psychology of Sex 2. The Historical Family and Family as an Institution 3. The Modern Family and Its Problems III. PEOPLES AND CULTURAL GROUPS 1. Social Origins and Primitive Society 2. Folklore, Myth, and Language 3. Histories of Cultural Groups (Kulturgeschichte) 4. Immigrants, Immigration, and Distribution of Population 5. Colonial Problems and Missions 6. Comparative Studies of Cultural Traits; Religion, Mores, Customs, and Traditions IV. CONFLICT AND ACCOMMODATION GROUPS 1. Classes and the Class Struggle; Labor and Capital 2. Nationalities and Races 3. Political Parties and Political Doctrines 4. Religious Denominations and Sects V. COMMUNITIES AND TERRITORIAL GROUPS VI. SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS 1. Home and Housing 2. The Church and the Local Community 3. The School and the Social Center 4. Play, the Playhouse, and Playgrounds 5. Courts and Legislation 6. Social Agencies 7. Other Institutions VII. SOCIAL SCIENCE AND THE SOCIAL PROCESS 1. The Economic Process: Economic and Industrial Organization 2. The Cultural Process: Education and Religion 3. The Political Process: Politics and the Formation of Public Opinion 4. Collective Behavior. Social Change and Social Progress; Fashion, Reform, and Revolution |