Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/23

 A DECADE OF SOCIOLOGY 7

One of the most respected clergymen in the United States wrote not long ago in a private letter :

I am free to say that I do not expect much from sociology. The moral life of man is old, and one of the greatest books upon the moral life of man- kind is the Ethics of Aristotle, written fifty years before Christ. Thinkers make a mistake, in my judgment, in supposing that because the cosmos is new, and surprising, therefore, in its revelations through modern science, the moral and spiritual life of mankind is new; and that philosophical interpreta- tions of that moral and spiritual life based upon history and experience are premature. I cannot agree to that position.

We would condemn ourselves neither by belittling- Aristotle nor by admitting that explanation of human life stopped with him. In order to fall into either error, one must misknow both Aristotle and modern positive philosophy. There is as much difference between Aristotle's static version of the world and the modern process-conception as there is between an eight-day clock and the evolution of species.

The fact that a profound and progressive thinker can write the last part of the paragraph we have quoted, under the impres- sion that it impeaches recent sociology, is the best sort of index that our field is white for the harvest.

The time is past for wasting effort in arguing that the socio- logical point of view must have cumulative influence upon every division of social science and social art. So much progress has been made in preliminary survey of the social process as a whole, that it will not be much longer possible for ostensible explana- tion of any fraction of human affairs to obtain credit, unless that fraction is accounted for as a part of the whole social process. There is no such reality as an abstraction in human experience. Everything, from the most rarefied image in the mind of a phi- losopher to the most weighty affair of state, is merely a more or less complex mesh in a concrete fabric of human relations. We are children playing with blocks, if we suppose we can account for parts of life without giving due credit to the rest of life.

Reduced to its lowest terms, the argument of the sociologists is : We have not been thinking things through to the end. We