This is a ' scientific ' way of saying that if we are unconcerned about our differences or similarities, they are not the sources of friendship or hostility.

Yet all this is comparatively minor. Much more important are Mr. Sorokin 's conception of the social process, his classification of cultures and the laws of their periodicity, his causal analysis of war and prescription for peace.

Mr. Sorokin 's views concerning the nature of social-cultural process make the very conception of causality tantamount to that of destiny. To the question: what causes social and cultural change, he boldly answers, the working out of an 'imminent principle .' External factors are merely subordinate. The real reason why the Graeco-Roman culture declined was that it was its nature to decline. Every system of culture has a 'mission.' When it fulfills this mission, it is replaced by another system whose essential nature expresses another aspect of 'genuine reality .' On the empirical plane, Mr. Sorokin contends, this conception of the essential or immanent nature of things determining all behavior and history is at the heart of the scientific method. For example, it is absurd to believe that changes in technology explain any changes in economics or law, or vice versa. The truth is that,

the whole dominant sociocultural system of the West the whole dominant sociocultural system of the West change experienced by was responsible for all the manifold developments in its economic, religious, political and other subsystems: just as the change in stature, weight, glands and mentality of an organism from childhood to puberty is caused by the whole process of growth.

But these are the sheerest tautologies and explain nothing. The process of growth doesn't cause is the the changes listed: It these changes. Our problem begins at this point - to discover necessary and sufficient conditions of the specific changes. To say that a man dies because it is his nature to die doesn't get us very far in the study of senescence. We want to know why his nature is what it is, what it depends on, what factors must be controlled to alter it or preserve it. Science would have come to a dead halt long ago had it operated with Mr. Sorokin 's antiquated notions of essential natures.

No more satisfactory is Mr. Sorokin 's classification of cultures into 'ideational,' 'idealistic,' and 'sensate.' The first is based on a supernatural conception of reality; the second on an ideal synthesis of the supernatural and natural; the third - our own - on the materialistic glorification of the senses in every phase of its activity from art to religion to mathematics. The author owes us proof that cultures are based on a philosophical conception of reality. His strenuous efforts to bring all cultural data under his rubrics, although interesting, are unconvincing. Tremendous differences in the forms of contemporary culture are slurred. Thus the police states of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and the parliamentary democracies of Great Britain and America are regarded equally as political expressions of our sensate age.

Some of Mr. Sorokin 's judgm ents are so violent that they strike one as denunciations rather than as sober descriptions. Contemporary art is characterized as immoral and degenerate 'operating mainly on the level of social sewers .' The contributions of the psychoanalytic school are referred to as 'quasi -pornographic. '