Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/121

 Rh present observing the most scientific decorum in dealing with societary facts, are inclined to presume that facts are fit only for the material of social palliatives and nostrums until they are centuries old. But revision of that presumption is going on. Scholars are beginning to see that the industrial order of the present century is both a statical and a dynamic exhibit from which inductions of more credibility and greater relative significance may be derived than from analysis of vaguely represented industrial systems of which it is extremely doubtful if we have sufficiently complete information for useful conclusions.

The like may be said of our constitutional development in the present century: of our educational, ecclesiastical, scientific, social and philanthropic readjustments. Each of these has exhibited within an easily observable period a series of statical conditions and lines of dynamic operations which would yield larger proportionate returns to scientific scrutiny than all available evidence about any period except the present. By knowing the present better we shall be able to make better use of knowledge that may be gained about the past. This fact gives to the work performed by many observers of neglected contemporary facts a dignity that is as yet too rarely acknowledged.

The recently established sociological department of a prominent theological journal makes a painfully amateurish display in dealing with questions of sociological method. Any alleged science is essentially fraudulent that claims authority in expression of conclusions before mastery has been acquired of the postulates and processes by the use of which conclusions are derived. The editor of the department referred to has not yet arrived at an intelligent rendering of the rudimentary postulate "society is an organism." It is quite conceivable that future sociologists may invent a more precise and luminous expression of the idea so formulated, but it is morally certain that nobody will contribute much, except by accident, to a more adequate account of the facts, until he has become able to understand the sense in which the present formula is employed.

The interpretation which is imposed upon the conception of society as an organism by the editor in question, is that it presumes society to be something which belongs properly within the field of zoölogy, or perhaps even botany. Human groups, or societies, either in the most narrow or in the most comprehensive sense, are made up of