Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/19

 office of public teacher today are grievously sinning against their fellows by aggressive and inflammatory sociological dogmatism. Science makes common cause with every other human interest when it insists that there must be adequate investigation and formulation of the conditions of human welfare before there can be any credible programmes for the wholesale promotion of welfare. The institutions which our generation inherits may be very crude, but they are the deposit of all the wisdom and goodness of the ages, in reaction with the ignorance and the evil. He who would reorder them should first understand them.

In the last chapter of his last important book Mr. Herbert Spencer says:

There exist a few who. . . . look forward through unceasing changes,. . . . to the evolution of a Humanity adjusted to the requirements of its life. And along with this belief there arises, in an increasing number, the desire to further the development. . . . . Hereafter the highest ambition of the beneficent will be to have a share. . . . in the making of Man. Experience occasionally shows that there may arise extreme interest in pursuing entirely unselfish ends; and, as time goes on, there will be more and more of those whose unselfish end will be the further evolution of Humanity.

Precisely because permanent enlargement of human welfare is not a matter of shreds and patches, but a gain which depends upon the development of a superior type of manhood, capable of superior coöperation, do we maintain that the programme most directly adapted to the furtherance of that end is suppression of the riot of imagination and substitution of the order of investigation.

VI. Many capable scholars are beginning to recognize in these conditions a summons to unique forms of service. Our thesis implies no depreciation of the scholarship of the past. Splendid specialism has been amassing more knowledge than we have learned to use. A federation of scholarship is forming by which the products of divided labor upon knowledge needed for social purposes shall be combined and applied as means of promoting welfare. That which has been unconscious and accidental hitherto will be