Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/20

 4 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

situation as less satisfactory than it might be, and trying to hit upon means of changing it for the better. It would be extrava- gant to claim that the words may now be interpreted in a stricter sense. There is not yet a body of technical sociologists large enough to give distinctive character to a period, as the physical scientists have to the past century, and the biologists in particular to the last half-century. More people are in evidence, however, than there were ten years ago, who are willing to consider social relations in the light of all that can be discovered about them, by comparison with similar relations under all the other circum- stances in which they can be traced. More people believe that it is worth while to pursue these large generalizations, and to organize them into a fundamental social science.

It would be easy to specify numerous particulars in which there has been approach toward consensus among the sociolo- gists, but it would be less easy to prove that our judgment about these items is correct. Without taking the risk of mistaking individual opinion for general consent, we merely observe, first, that the number of details passing into the rank of accepted sociological results is as great as could fairly be expected so early in the history of a science; and, second, it is safe to predict that a considerable body of principles will have been provisionally accepted by the sociologists before the close of another decade.

At all events, there is no doubt worth mention that the view- point from which the technical sociologists observe social facts has already become essentially one and the same. Whatever their spe- cific hypotheses in explanation of social phenomena, they all refer the facts to the same psychic forces, operating in the same physi- cal environment. They all regard human experience as the evo- lution of human choices, conditioned by both the controllable and the uncontrollable factors of physical nature. In other words, the attitude of the sociologists toward their problems is precisely that of chemist, or physicist, or physiologist toward his. In either case the problem is to discover the particular relations of cause and effect involved in a given situation. Of course, soci- ology is far behind the older sciences in making out the specific causal relations to which it is devoted. On the other hand, it