Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/111

 THE FOUNDERS OF SOCIOLOGY 99

practical convenience we must, of course, resort to some classifi- cation of sociologists, just as we need to classify vegetables, or any other group of phenomena that we desire to talk about or use. The classification of sociologists is an urgent (and practicable) problem alike of government, of education, and of science. And when the politicians, the teachers, and the scientists foregather (if ever), we may anticipate the undertaking of a rational census. For the immediate purposes of the present argument a few broad distinctions may be useful. There are first those who make serious endeavors to disengage their sociological concep- tions from their own social conduct and emotion, and then pro- ceed to enlarge these conceptions by absorbing as much as they can of the recorded experience of others, meanwhile ever being on the watch to test and verify the validity of their sociological conceptions by social observation and experiment. These are the rational, the scientific, or the philosophical sociologists the sociologists proper, as one might say. Of the numerous varieties that come under this class, or order, two or three only need to be noted here. There are those who seek sociological truth, and find the pursuit so absorbing as to forget that there are other forms of knowledge, and that knowledge itself belongs to the scaffolding of life. These illustrate the dangers of spe- cialism they start out to find a treasure and get lost in the search. The intellectual danger is one of artificial limitation as the late Professor Chandler, of Oxford, used to say : " If a man knows nothing but beetles, he will go through the world and see nothing but beetles." But action cannot be thus limited; hence it so frequently comes about that in the case of the specialists in social science there is so striking a discrepancy between thought and action. Their theory is divorced from their practice. They keep their sociological knowledge and their social conduct in separate water-tight compartments like Faraday with his science and his religion, of which he said he kept the first in one pocket, and the second in the other. Then there are those who endeavor to reunite into a nobler art of conduct their sociological science and their social practice, provisionally separated by a device of reason in its perpetual struggle with instinct ; or, as we