logical facts of human, and more generally of all organic, nature. And he guides us with equal breadth of view and mastery of detail through the disorderly mass of social phenomena.

Community as opposed to Society, the real and organic as opposed to the ideal and mechanical, the natural as opposed to the artificial-this is the antithesis on which the theory before us is built up. Men have part and lot one in another. They are knit one to another through bonds of blood, through a common dwelling-place and common tilth, or in a mystical union of spirit. Kinsman is bound to kinsman, neighbour to neighbour, friend to friend. In household, village-commune and city-state alike, no man lives to himself and none dies to himself. From the deepest human relation of child to mother, and secondarily from that of child to father, to brothers and sisters, or to kinsmen generally, the organic solidarity of primitive human groups arises. From the household, which is as it were the organic cell of communal life (p. 30), community of existence spreads in widening circles, and we get, perhaps, masters and lords, and prentices and servants, but still in organic connexion with one another. Lordship arises as much from augmented duties and rights as from the diminution of these duties and rights (p. 22), and it long remains relative, communal and shared, or finally representative. Again, with the more complex developments of the commune exchange arises, and in particular that between town and country (p. 34); but this, too, remains communistic, and no man is a self-seeker as dealer, merchant or usurer. And the happy commune is perfected by arts as well industrial as æsthetic, resting equally, as Goethe says, on a kind of religious sense (p. 43), and finally by religion itself.

How, then, do profit-making and usury and landlordism enter this happy Eden? Simply because the individual unnaturally separates himself and his interests through thought from that whole to which he really belongs. He looks to his own ends, and to these only, and will only give in order to receive. The lord unrighteously asserts absolute, individual and exclusive property in the land (p. 38). The dealer acts no longer as trustee merely in exchange, but for his own hand (p. 68). The merchant appears who is not necessarily the citizen of any land (p. 62); and with the invention of Money, which represents the abstract notion of value (p. 52), or which is the potentiality of all commodities (p. 211), every man becomes a merchant (p. 60). A Creditsystem makes usury possible. He who possesses money appropriates the surplus-value supplied by labour which hunger forces to sell itself for bread (p. 71). The drones live on the labourclass, which is at best half-free (p. 95). Convention and contract supersede custom and status, and the reign of competing capital begins.

In this account of the social system, which the Romans evolved in the old world, and which has generally obtained in modern

times, Herr Tönnies is greatly influenced, as he confesses, by Rodbertus and by Marx (p. xxviii.); and since he attaches chief importance to this side of his theory (ib.), the relation of his economics to these teachers calls for some remark. First, then, he accepts the position that "the necessary minimum for the maintenance of life and proper consumption during the time over which a man's labour is to extend" (p. 86) is the limit of the law of wages, and a limit which we tend actually to reach. To this, of course, it is to be objected that the attainment of this limit would be suicidal for capitalism, which needs for the permanence of the existing system the reproduction of at least the present amount of labour-power; i.e., the unit in determining wages is, as Ricardo showed, not the individual but the family. Our author, however, would not shrink from the paradox of attributing suicidal leanings to the bourgeois system; in introducing, for example, the notion of permanent obligation-which is yet in the world of facts not possible-"a perpetual bond is constituted in contradiction to the whole notion of Society, a bond, too, which does not bind things only but persons: the relation which in simple exchange-transactions is momentary, becomes conceived as unlimited in time" (p. 58); or, again, in placing the wages-labourer, who if he is to be the subject of contract must be free, in virtual slavery, a paradox which issues in the class-wars of great cities and the fall of bourgeois culture. And so the objection misses fire. Secondly, however, he adopts, though in a modified and quasi-metaphorical sense, the dogma that labour is the source of all wealth," and also, for determining value, though only ideally so, the conception of "average socially necessary labour-time" (p. 87), of which he notwithstanding says, that it is only a true criterion where nature-powers have no exchange-value, and where and when men co-operate perfectly with one another and with machinery! Thirdly, he uses the famous doctrine of his two predecessors concerning surplus-value (Mehrwerth), "the difference between the price at which labour-power is bought in, and that at which not its product but its exchange-value as involved in the product is sold" (p. 90); and here it might be objected that his position in this regard is not consistent with the statement that it is self-evident that thing a for person B may be better than thing b, and yet thing for person A better than thing a" (p. 47); an admission, however, which he renders nugatory by his doctrine of objective value. Lastly, his more general attacks on the merchant and the profit-monger, which are based on Marx, lose some of their cogency from the fact that (p. 68) he mentions and fails to rebut the claim of the former to pose as the "organ of importation or supply," and from the fact that he at least recognises interest (p. 67) in the cases of lucrum cessans and damnum emergens, and specifically (p. 57) as something "to which a man has a just claim if the return of the capital has not been promised for a

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definite date"; in which case, however, he perhaps might intend the interest to be treated as an instalment of the debt, a view which, it must be admitted, fits in very well with what immediately follows concerning permanent obligations.

It is rather, then, in respect of the general spirit than on account of the letter of his criticism of Capitalism that Herr Tönnies has our sympathy and carries us away with him. And the spirit of his criticism leads us directly to its basis in his psychology, which is expounded as "Wesenwille u. Willkür”.

Wesenwille, or the true and essential real communal will, involves thought; but Willkür, or the factitious and arbitrary selfish will, is thought or thought's creation. The one is universal nisus. The other is individual volition. The one is connected closely with organic nature. The other is mechanically thought. On Wesenwille grows Community. On Willkür is built up Society.

Wesenwille expresses itself in reference to the vegetal life as Gefallen, or the affirmation of the principles of life; in relation to the animal life, as Habit; as a form of mental life, as Memory (Gedächtniss). The three forms are closely bound up together, and from the last develops Conscience (Gewissen) and Morality, but apparently also the whole self-willed individualist nature (Willkür), which, disengaging itself from the communal will, observes prudence in sacrificing the less for the more profitable, looks for adequate means to its own ends, posits and systematises its own particular ends, and is at war with folly, as the true will is with evil (p. 129).

The triads in the development of the psychological antithesis are somewhat artificial, and many of the distinctions drawn seem over-subtle. And the central element in the psychological scheme (Gedächtniss) appears too vague for its position. Why is Speech said (p. 113) to be "the generic expression of the mental life," of which dumb thought is only a form? And if Gedächtniss only comes to full development, or even to development at all, with speech-'God gave man speech and speech created thought '-can it be memory merely of the traces left by modification of the organism (p. xix.)? Apparently it is something more. Habit is made to do all that unconscious memory does in the theories of Hering and S. Butler for the evolution of animal instinct (p. 112), while "Memory" is rather that imagination or fancy (p. 117) which appears as genius, or it is a sense of duty (p. 141) whose true treasure is to know the just and good in order to love and do it (p. 113); and Conscience too is somehow a form of "Memory," which arises in the relation of man to man (p. 121). Is this sufficiently lucid to justify so definitely articulated a superstructure of social theory?

Nevertheless, Herr Tönnies is not open to some of the objections which one might be inclined to pour forth upon him. He does not (p. xix.) believe in the evolution of the moral from the

immoral. Morality, indeed, becomes explicit through the development of particular feelings and habits, but it is in the germ in the original organic unity. Why do I feel Gefallen and not rather Missfallen? Because there is a real organic natural fitness. And on like lines habits are formed in one direction rather than another, and memory takes up this and leaves that. What I evolve is involved in the germ. And if morality be already there, then "Memory" might well also be sense of duty. Wesenwille keeps men together, knit in the bonds of fellowship, supplying each the other's moral as well as physical needs. The arbitrary or factitious will, on the other hand, separates men and supplies for each his own material wants. Herein, then, our author inverts Schopenhauer, as he has already inverted Hobbes and Spencer. He affirms the world as will; denies it as idea.

In a discussion of will there arises always the problem of freedom. And the solution of this book would seem to be that "in the sphere of the true will there is no alternative; possibility implies actuality" (p. 147). "All Can involves a real Must" (p. 148); i.e., the true will is determined but autonomous. Conversely, the factitious will is indeterminate but heteronomous, not therefore free, but rather froward. A difficulty, however, then arises, which I think is not here solved, with regard to the possibility of the free will's extricating or disengaging itself from the determinate, and of raising its superstructure, or, to vary the metaphor, appearing as a pathological and parasitical fungus.

Women, children and the commonalty express true will. Men, adults and the cultured few, factitious freedom, which culminates in science and cosmopolitan opinion. A young woman who acts from feeling and conscience, and with modesty, is the typical subject of will. An old man who calculates is the normal subject of Willkür. The lies of the market unsex woman; and the emancipation of women and children-with the result that "the family becomes an accidental form for the satisfaction of physical wants" (p. 191), and that monogamy, or the union of a whole life, becomes unessential (p. 245)—is the last evil of society.

Herr Tönnies applies his theory to natural law, and seems to establish the fact that jus naturale has more senses than one, according as its subject is an essential self which is part of a whole and a whole of parts, or a person factitious and accidental, extra res and post rem, but thought as an end "in and for itself' (p. 205). And he accordingly adopts Maine's view of the jus gentium and its place in the development of law and the doctrine of rights. Only so far, however, that when the State, a social arbitrary product, as this student of Hobbes maintains, is constituted, the State having sole power of distress itself interprets the natural right which is above it and should control it as a trustee, and allows no right against itself. Natural right in the sense of the personal rights of the abstract mortal is a product of society, which yet tends to substitute for it positive right; till in the

fulness of time the State shall abolish itself. Natural right in the communal sense is far other. The antitheses of contract-law and family-law, &c., are fully set forth in the third and last book of this essay.

We might be disposed to quarrel with the position that the State is artificial, but we find a Gemein-wesen, related to community as animal to plant (p. 255)! which answers all our purposes, and we can, therefore, afford to let the State go. Especially as this theory gives us the right to uphold the contracttheory of society with Hobbes, and yet to say with Maine that the commune is not made but grows. We may be dialectic with Hegel, evolutionist with Mr. Spencer, and Herr Tönnies can reconcile us all: "all science and therefore all philosophy as science is rationalistic; its objects are thought-constructions. But all philosophy and therefore science as philosophy is empirical" (p. xxiv.). When we quarrel we do not mean the same thing; when we agree we are of course right.

It is not, however, so much in the bright reconstruction of a social world on Spinozistic or Schopenhauerian lines, nor in the application of evolution and rationalism side by side, that the value of this book lies, but rather in what Herr Tönnies commends in Maine-light-giving aperçus" (p. xxviii.). (p. xxviii.). He is original, and thinks through a mass of tangled details honestly and sincerely, and if not convincing, the book is one which might yet elevate us almost to the level of that socialism which shall be. HERBERT W. BLUNT.