Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/113

 THE FO UNDERS OF SOC/OLOG Y 1 1

languages and literatures, in systems of philosophy and of reli- gion. There is a saying of Luther that " a man can today learn in three years more things than formerly were known to all the universities and monasteries." With this sixteenth-century utter- ance may be compared the nineteenth-century remark of Helm- holz that "the schoolboy of today with his lexicon can surpass Erasmus." But what becomes of the schoolboy's superiority if he does not learn to utilize all those mechanical accessories with- out which past experience as recorded in orderly systematization is a locked treasure the catalogues, lexicons, registers, indexes, digests, scientific and literary annuals, etc.? Without these and the architectonic conceptions necessary for their use, he is like a mariner without a compass. He is, indeed, in an inferior cultural position to his Renaissance ancestor, because of a greater liability to be buried under deeper accumulation of past experience.

The mind of youth trembles on the verge of the great awaken- ing to the social heritage of the past the possible socialization of all experience. Those in this transitional position are the incipient sociologists. Then in the history of each individual ensues a struggle betwen the progressive and degeneratory forces of life, as we say in sociological terminology; or, in poetic phrase, between the powers of light and of darkness ; or, in the language of theology, between God and the devil. If to continue the military metaphor the degeneratory overcome the progressive forces, then the individual becomes a fossil sociologist. If neither achieves the victory, he becomes a slumbering sociologist; and the older he grows, the more difficult to awaken him.

A classification of mankind into three large groups was made by Cardan, a humanist of the Italian Renaissance one of those earlier students of social phenomena whom, unless we call them forerunners of sociology, it is difficult to designate culturally, since they are strictly neither historians nor philosophers. Car- dan divided men into these three classes : ( I ) those who possess divine knowledge, and who neither deceive nor are deceived by others; (2) those who only possess human knowledge, and who both deceive and are deceived ; (3) those who have neither human nor divine knowledge, and who do not deceive, but who them-