Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/219

Rh is sure to be at a given moment any more truly static than it is dynamic.

The most important difference between Professor Ward's view and my own in this connection is only hinted at in his paper. It is that I regard the discovery of the outline of an improved social order as the most important concern of the statical division of sociology, while Professor Ward has no toleration for that idea.

On this point three propositions will be at present sufficient: First, there are but two strata of statical condition which have any considerable interest in themselves for social beings. These are, in the first place, the actual order of the present time; and, in the second place, the future order about which everybody speculates as "the good time coming." Sociologists are as a rule interested in past status, not as archaeologists, but as surveyors of preliminaries to social dynamics. The men who have made most strenuous attempts to formulate the social order of past civilizations have had in view the derivation of conclusions not merely about the statics of past times, but about dynamic principles effective in all times.

Second, the theory of a social order not yet realized is as properly statical as the theory of a past order. I am not now referring to the plans proposed for realizing the conception, but to the conception itself as a self-consistent arrangement of social elements. Thus the members of the assembly that drew up the Constitution of the United States were dealing with statical theory just as truly as are men who today lecture upon the theory of the Roman state, or the principles of the English constitution. Third, provided that it is a construction of known facts and demonstrated principles, a doctrine of an unrealized statical condition may be just as scientific as a theory of an existing or a formerly existing condition. The theory of the Ferris wheel is no more and no less a statical theory, no more and no less scientific today than when it was merely on paper as plans and specifications of an unrealized ideal. It is as competent for the sociologist as for the engineer to discover and organize in idea unused possibilities of combination.