and psychological development with sociological, was the greatest service performed to me personally, and I doubt not that this was his greatest achievement. From these relationships he passes on to rational selection and the control of society in its own interests. Comte gave sociology a place in the hierarchy of sciences. Spencer systematized ethnological and anthropological data. Schaffle outlined a system of social structure, and de Greef combined the social structure with social activities, but Ward developed the plan on which society was evolved, discussed the principles on which it was founded, and operated and presented a program by which it could be improved. One cannot help regret that his Pure Sociology and his Applied Sociology could not have been followed by a work on social technology to complete the system. His recent writings on eugenics and practical social problems would seem to indicate that had he lived, a third volume would have been necessary to complete his system. Mr. Ward has been criticized for undue emphasis laid upon social forces in both dynamic and pure sociology. Yet the great lines of his argument are in the main correct. One of his characteristics was to emphasize causation, and his social forces are social causes. They were the causes which created society and held it intact and hence were more truly socializing forces than true social forces. The latter arise out of society, and are the results of social activity rather than the causes, for real social forces arise from group activity. Nevertheless his concept is a valuable one from which all sociologists have profited. Differ as we may from some of his points of view, object as we may to some of his conclusions, the facts remain that he was the first great sociologist, that his work is epoch-making for social science, and that his system is monumental. Sociology, in its synthetic processes, and in its methods will change, but for years to come all writers must recognize the great lines of his system. FRANK W. BLACKMAR University of Kansas If it is possible for me to add anything to what has been said or implied in the foregoing tributes, it will be by way of personalities which will be pardonable as ancient history. I cannot precisely date my discovery of Dynamic Sociology, but its meaning for me was crucial, and I was aware at once that it had leveled barriers to an advanced stage in my mental growth. I had been occupying a chair of history and economics for a number of years. So far as I had developed a "method," it was under heavy bonds to speculation, rather than intelligently objective. I had given an undue proportion of attention to the philosophers of history, but both they and the historians proper had lost their grip on my credulity. Two things kept recurring in my thoughts, first, that there must be some sort of correlation between human occurrences, and second, that the clues to that correlation must be found by checking up cause and effect between human occurrences themselves, not in some a priori. I had read both of Comte's major works, but had been more impressed by their absurdities in detail than by the saving remnant of wisdom. They had increased my wistfulness for a credible clue to the explanation of human experience, but they had not appealed to me as affording anything very plausible to supply the want. I had read everything that Spencer had published, but the elements in his method that afterward seemed to me most useful failed to find me at first. The sight of the title Dynamic Sociology instantly acted as a reagent to crystallize elements that had been incoherent in my mind, and to separate the product from foreign substances. The moment I began to turn the leaves of the book, I was aware of feeling as the alchemists might have felt two or three centuries earlier if they had stumbled upon the "philosophers' stone." At the same time the book never seemed to me a solution, but rather a wonderfully expressive symbolic guide to the path in which solutions might be found. The epithet "materialistic" stood then for the most inexorable taboo in my ritual. After finishing the first reading, I wrote to the author: "I was well along in the book before I found reason to question my classification of you as a materialist. If that is what you call yourself, I must admit that materialism ceased to seem to me a very terrible foe of the spirit, when I found you ending the book with an exhortation." Dynamic Sociology did not seem to me to push the frontier of the ontological problem any further back toward ultimates than hundreds of philosophers had reached. It did make me feel more secure in accepting the working necessity of dealing with orders of phenomena in accordance with their last discoverable traits even if this procedure leaves us with practical duality. It enabled me to think of so-called physical and psychical phenomena as equally real, as equally instrumental in their place, as functioning in orders of experience which are somehow related whether we are able to formulate the relationships or not. It placed psychical causation on a plane of plausibility as convincing as the presuppositions of physical causation, without resorting to anything extra-phenomenal in support of the one more than of the other. It located social causation within human beings, instead of outside, above, beneath, or beyond them. It punctured the bubble of metaphysical philosophy of human experience, and exposed the literal problems of human relationships under the aspect of psychology as the ultimate analysis. As I said, this did not solve the problems, but it proposed them as real, whereas they had previously been formulated as more or less mythical or mystical. I have often said, and it remains my estimate, that, everything considered, I would rather have written Dynamic Sociology than any other book that has ever appeared in America. Not surely because it has gained more applause of men than many others. I found in 1888 that Professor Ely was the only member of the Johns Hopkins faculty who seemed to know anything about the book. In 1893 Dr. Ward told me that barely five hundred copies had been sold. It was, however, at least a generation ahead of the sociological thinking of Great Britain and it saved American sociologists the long wandering in the wilderness of misconstrued evolutionism from which English sociology is at this late day working out the rudiments of its salvation. I must confess that I have never been able to learn from Dr. Ward's later works anything of first-rate importance which I did not find in Dynamic Sociology. Unless I misunderstood his own estimate, my reaction was strictly in accordance with his own view of his writings. He thought he had said in substance in his first book everything which his later writings. contained, but that the greater elaboration was necessary in order to make his message carry. I think he would have indorsed my opinion that the later books were justified pedagogically, but that they exhibited a scientific anti-climax. It would be impossible for me to express the sense of security which I felt in my earlier venturings into sociology, because of Dr. Ward's previous explorations. I might compare it with the confidence of a dispatch boat convoyed by a battleship. After it became less venturesome to be a sociologist, Dr. Ward's friendship, on both the personal and the professional planes, was always an inspiration and a benediction. ALBION W. SMALL University of Chicago THE RURAL SOCIAL CENTER HENRY S. CURTIS Because the inhabitants of the country are scattered, and society is impossible in connection with daily work, the social center or common meeting-ground seems to be more needed in the country than it is in the city. It is doubtful if the social and recreational life and business co-operation can be organized without it. The social center movement has taken a powerful hold on the imagination of the country during the last few years, but thus far not so strong a hold on the country as on the city. Still there is something being done in nearly every county in the northern part of this country at present. The Social Center Association of America was organized at the University of Wisconsin in the fall of 1911 with Professor Edward J. Ward as secretary and Josiah Strong as president. Professor Ward is organizing social centers about the state of Wisconsin from the extension department of the university, and five other states have already undertaken a similar work. There is keen interest in nearly all parts of the country, and the states of Wisconsin and Minnesota have recently passed laws requiring school boards to open the school buildings to the public whenever the public may desire it. In the last presidential campaign, the three candidates each indorsed the idea of this wider use of school buildings, and in Chicago, Rochester, and several other cities the schools were used for campaign speeches and in some for polling-places as well. One of the most able addresses that was given at the formation of the association was made by Governor Wilson, so it would look as though the movement should receive all due official encouragement during the years that are upon us. It has the indorsement of the National Education Association and of all prominent educators everywhere. The spread of the idea has been so quiet, and the recent developments have been so little reported, that it is almost impossible to |