Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/119

 THE FOUNDERS OF SOCIOLOGY 107

And are not the same principles demonstrated and exempli- fied in application to the making of the poet in the lives of Virgil, of Dante, or of Milton? Sir Joshua's maxim is almost a para- phrase of Dante's thought in contemplating the sages and heroes of antiquity " the great spirits by whose sight I am exalted in my own esteem."

You cannot hope to become a poet, or a painter, without strenuous educative efforts; still less, perhaps, a sociologist. The sociologist, in the empirical sense the earliest and most primitive of social types, is in the scientific and artistic sense the latest of human types to be evolved. It is the type of the future. And so far we may agree with those who say the science of sociology has yet to be created provided always that position is not used as an argument for inaction, the deadliest of all the sins. Everyone may make some real contribution to the science of sociology. The one condition is a sustained effort to acquire something of the sociological habit of mind, something of the propensity to social action.

What this sociological habit of mind is, what these social pro- pensities are, we ought to be able to find out most clearly and vividly by a study of the lives and work of the reputed founders of sociology. Of the many different ways in which the problems of sociology have been approached t there are three or four which are sufficiently distinct and characteristic to provide a rough classification of those customarily reckoned founders of the sci- ence. There are certain observers of social phenomena who see most clearly and vividly the influence of nature in determining the activities and thoughts of man ; and there are others who see most clearly and vividly the internal forces of the mind in their operation upon man himself and his environment. Those who lean to the former position are the more objective, the more observational, the more concrete sociologists. Those who lean to the latter position are the more subjective and abstract sociologists.

All through the history of the science we see the alternate predominance of one or other of these types, and, moreover, in the lives of most individual sociologists there tends to be some