ABSTRACT
If the term be taken in a general sense, Mr. Patten’s “Development of English Thought” is a working out of a materialistic conception of history, although his “materialistic conception” is not nearly the same as that to which Marx and Engels gave a vogue in socialistic circles. It is needless to say that it is a marked advance over the somewhat crude form in which the great socialists left their fundamental concept. While they were content with an appeal to class interest and antagonism as a sufficient explanation of the control of cultural development through the economic situation, Mr. Patten’s modern scientific animus leads him to look more closely into the causal relation between the economic situation and the resulting culture. The resulting theory is not a doctrine of a class struggle. In Mr. Patten’s view the economic situation shapes culture by shaping human character and habits of thought. It does this somewhat directly, through a process of habituation as well as through a concomitant process of selection between habits and between different styles of temperament. The causal relation between the situation (“environment”) and the cultural outcome, therefore, lies through the psychological development of the individuals who are exposed to this environment. Some part of the theoretical ground on which this materialistic doctrine pro-
ceeds has already been set forth, in greater detail, in an earlier monograph on “The Theory of Social Forces.” The elements of that theory are (1) a frankly and uncritically accepted, though modified, associational psychology, such as had general vogue until a generation ago, with its accompanying hedonism, and (2) a rationalistic doctrine of evolution, stated in terms of the consummation to which the development should tend in order to meet the author’s ideal. It is part of the tacit premises of this doctrine that evolution means improvement, amelioration, progress; hence there is occasional reference to the “normal line” of development, and some phases of the development are spoken of as departures and detours from the normal. This resort to normality and a more or less constraining meliorative trend is scarcely a modern feature.
