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 98 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

money? Who is so old as not to remember the days of youthful- ness, in which a genuine curiosity was felt about the natural history of a five-pound note? The boy who hesitates between buying a pocketknife and a copy of The Three Musketeers is fathei to the man who hesitates between the purchase of a horse and the Encyclopedia Britannica. But the man of forty may be and alas! generally is more indifferent than the youth of twenty about the chain of individual and social consequences that depends on whether one buys horses or encyclopaedias. The incipient sociologist of twenty may become the (scientifically) stunted, dwarfed, and degenerate sociologist of forty, the multi- plication of encyclopaedias notwithstanding. The educational machine still, as in the time of Rabelais, grinds out Gargantuas who study with great zeal, and the more they study, the more they become " foolish, stupid, tiresome, and silly." They are like that hero of modern education of whom Sir John Seeley used to tell. Having exhausted all the great prizes of Cambridge, he ceased to take any interest in life, because he "could not think of any- thing else to do."

To take a final illustration : There is no one who is not pre- pared to give some sort of answer to the question why a clergy- man is of a superior social repute to a shopkeeper (provided he is not a very rich one) ; why, in occidental civilizations, a fighting general is more popular than an epic poet ; why boys play football and girls with dolls ; why disease and crime, vice and lunacy are normal accompaniments of poverty and of luxury ; why marriage is a religious institution and parliament a civil one sometimes; why thieves are sent to prison, retired brewers to the House of Lords, retired bricklayers to the workhouse, and foreigners to the devil. Whoever answers, or even raises, any or all of these questions is whether he knows it or not talking sociology.

Let it be admitted, then, that everyone may with appropriate- ness be called a sociologist in some degree or kind. Between the two extremes there may be, and is, a very wide divergence, but the gradation from one to the other proceeds by insensible steps, and where are we to draw the line which separates those who are to be called sociologists from those who are not? For purposes of