Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/115

Rh sciences, there were other discoveries and inventions which by even more slow and difficult processes have grown into the social arts and sciences. Are we not to include among the founders of sociology the unknown discoverers and early improvers of the spoken and written language, of music and the fine arts; of the expression of ideals and their social uses? These processes of social invention and discovery set agoing, society finds itself in possession of a thaumaturgic agency which, operating on the elemental passions, is capable of transforming men into either gods or devils. Are not the limits of biological evolution transcended when, psychically speaking, the childless man acquires spiritual potentiality of countless offspring; and at the same time the individual acquires the spiritual potentiality of choosing, within limits, his own ancestry? And, by the same mysterious psychic forces, fear becomes convertible into courage, egoism into altruism, mating into marriage, courtesy into chivalry, kinship into humanism, resentment into sympathy, and sympathy into saintship. But the reverse processes are also seen to be easily set in operation, with their indefinite possibilities of moral and social degeneration. According to circumstances (the conditions being increasingly definable by the scientifically minded) the thaumaturgic agent acts either as dynamic of progress or as a furnace of degeneration—as white magic or as black magic.

The theologian may in theory have asserted that the fall was a prehistoric incident, but since the age of culture began, every constructive priest, every meditative parent, has in practice known that it is a perennial occurrence. He has, too, known that it has to be guarded against both by the negative processes of prevention and elimination, and by the positive processes of cultural rebirth and education. Thus the perennial problem has been—if one may put it so without anachronism—the sociological question: how to breed and train Platos and Bayards rather than Neros and Judases; Monicas and Beatrices rather than Messalinas and Cleopatras. Are not all who have contributed to this question to be counted as in some sense among the founders of sociology?

The answers made to the question are to be found in the