Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/116

104 and usages which regulate or constrain conduct, in the laws and institutions of the temporal and of the spiritual government, in so far as these customs and usages, laws and institutions, are not themselves the products of degeneratory processes and the creations of vicious or antisocial ideals. The knowledge on which these laws and institutions have been based, the ideas associated with these constraining customs and usages of social conduct, are, of course, only partially set forth in history and literature. To disclose this knowledge and these ideas, and to exhibit them in themselves and in relation to other phenomena moral and material apart from their immediate practical uses, is one of the main aims of the special cultivators of sociological science. And the point to be observed here is that from the beginnings of language up to the highest and latest generalizations of science, sociological or other, is one continuous process of psychic evolution, in which only for purposes of practical convenience we can draw arbitrary lines and say here empiricism ends and science begins. The gist of this is well expressed in Condillac's saying that "science is only a well-made language." The crude language of everyday experiences gets refined into literature; literature is, or should be, tested and verified and systematized by sociological science. And then, touched again by this spirit of literature, the truths of science are ready to pass back into the common experience, fortifying it and enriching it.

A correspondent once wrote to ask Ruskin what was the remedy for lust. The answer came back that there was one cure only for lust, and that was love. In saying that, Ruskin was not so much expressing a new idea (Plato, and doubtless many others, have it) as summarizing a mass of social experience in a very convenient and thought-economizing formula. In other words, he formulated a law of sociology. Now, most of the known laws of sociology have been formulated in this haphazard sort of way. They have, as it were, been discovered by chance, and to chance it has been left to determine whether they should be verified, modified, developed, systematized, applied, perverted, or forgotten. To attend to all these matters—to take them out of the region of chance, to bring them into the domain of human