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This is a thoughtful and suggestive book, which deserves to be widely read among students of social psychology. Though abounding in significant statements of fact and interesting points of view, there is in it
a very refreshing absence of dogmatism or onesidedness—two frequent vices which are particularly ill-becoming in a very youthful science, such as sociology.
The book is divided into five parts. In the first two parts the author treats of 'The Social Heritage and the Original Nature of Man' and of 'Social Evolution' respectively. He here emphasizes the importance of culture (taken in a wide sense to include the material aspects of civilization) as compared with original nature as determinants of social change. There is, he maintains, a rather widespread tendency to overstress the purely biological causes of change, and he makes some interesting suggestions as to the probable reasons for this overestimation of biological and the corresponding underestimation of cultural factors. Human nature, he is inclined to think, has changed but little since the last ice age; but human culture has changed enormously and is accumulating rapidly. The rate at which culture advances at first suggests the compound interest curve, but further examination shows it to be more complex than this. The frequency with which similar inventions are made independently at or about the same time is further impressive evidence of the influence of culture, as distinct from that of native ability, in promoting social change. (A list of 148 such inventions and discoveries is appended.)
Professor Ogburn is not inclined to attribute much importance to eugenic or dysgenic factors. His outlook is thus very different to that of such a social psychologist as McDougall, who has recently drawn attention, in such a striking way, to the possible significance of these factors, especially upon their psychological side. It is to be regretted in this connection that Professor Ogburn has not dealt mor