Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/137

 THE FOUNDERS OF SOCIOLOGY 125

Now, I just wanted to say that Mr. A's comments were very excellent. 1 think he was quote misapprehended by the gentleman on my left, when he stated that he (Mr. A) was opposed to science. I think he meant that there is something higher than the cold science of statistics, that there is beyond science a Being that is a spirit, and I call him God without shame, and that is all Mr. A believes in, and I believe in myself. At least I might believe in something more specific, if I were to state it. And the objection that these men mention in this paper Augustine and other men among them seems to involve the idea that Christianity is not progressive. I am a Christian man. I find I am far more progressive than very many men. What quotations I have heard men make here are generally inaccurate. A man here spoke about David. He said he chose a punishment that fell on his people instead of on himself. I remember that he could have chosen no punishment for himself. All three punishments offered by Jehovah would fall on the nation. I believe they were pestilence, the sword, and famine. There you see, there is an inaccuracy. And for another man to say that Christianity is not progressive is wide of the mark, because Christ was a soci- ologist in the true sense of the term, and I should be a true sociologist because I am a Christian man.

/. Regarding the paper, I can only agree with another speaker when he said it was unfortunately entitled " The Founders of Sociology." The writer hardly touched on the important work of sociologists, and of course he went too far back in the history of men. He need not have gone farther back than Comte, and he must out of sheer honesty have given some account of Giddings, of Harvard University. 1

As regards sociology, it is, if anything is, capable of concise definition. It is an endeavor to discover the laws which govern society, or govern life, and to classify them. Regarding the observations of many speakers, if we are going to ignore one of the greatest forces in human life, I must say we are preaching sociology from a very peculiar standpoint. We must study religion, and we must try to estimate its power as we must study science to estimate its power. But if we start off with the prepossession that science is everything, then we must make no progress whatever. We must have specialists for the different forces and specialists for classifying their results. There is no reason why we should not have a society with one man specializing on religion, and another on science, and another on socialism ; and when all the papers are collected, it is quite possible to get a mind with sufficient synthetical power to give a paper that would be a true sociological paper, that would be an approximation of the forces operating on society.

K- So far as I was; able to judge, I did not gather that Mr. Branford was wishing to exclude religion, and I am not sure that any of those who have spoken wish that, unless it were Mr. A. He certainly seemed to have a strong objection to science, and he showed how he despised science by speaking of it as " dry science," " dry methods of science," and by saying that it could do nothing, and that the spirit could do everything. He did not give us his definition of " spirit," nor did he, beyond his dogmatism, tell us what the spirit had done. For my part, I do not see what Mr. A meant in referring to " spirit " as being " thought creative of action," that constituting all the good, all the progress that has been made. For my part, I do not see how that dogmatism can be upheld and con- clusively proved, any more than the dogmatism that men of action have been responsible for everything and have been the people who have caused thought to be created. The two things must go together, as I understand life.

The gentleman opposite to me, in his opening remarks, with which I had some sympathy, complained that he seemed to have fallen among mystics, and he objected accordingly. I agree with him so far as he made any expressions on mysticism, but then he went on to foist the term " mystic " upon persons who thought that great value was to be obtained from the study of statistics. He seemed to think that statistics made the mystic. The very opposite is the fact, and if there is a class of people who can be called mystics, it is those who speak

1 We must preserve this bit of local color! EDITORS.