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 246 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

with a leap, let me believe a successful leap; and on you go, living as before, only more alive than ever for the success. In that moment of the looking and trying before leaping you were a scientist; not professionally, it is true, for you were in no laboratory, and had no carefully selected material, and were without instruments of precise measurement; but nevertheless personally and vitally. Out of just such looking and trying before leaping, moreover, the social profession of science, with all its instruments and its methods, has been developed. You were a scientist, then; and what your science taught you was just what, runner that you were, you both ought to do and most decidedly would do. The study of the conditions of action mani- fested in the course of action which is exactly what science is when stripped of its professional disguises always reveals at once an ought and a would, a duty and a pleasure; and it reveals these, moreover, in a thoroughly concrete way, finding the ideal only in what is real and manifest.

The methods and instruments of science, secondly, show how science meets the inquiry of ethics with something concrete uniting both duty and pleasure. Science is, above all else, experi- mentation ; it is trying as well as looking before leaping ; and in the methods and instruments it employs, be they the rules of thumb and the crude tools of ordinary experience, or the care- ful methods and precise instruments of professionally trained investigation, he who runs can read loyalty without bondage to the old, and regard without abandon to the new. Experimenta- tion, whether in the science of direct personal interest or in pro- fessional science, deals, of course, with the concrete, and this besides; it is plainly as conservative as it is radical, relying on its past for the methods and instruments with which it achieves its future, and even taking these very methods and instruments up into the achievement and making them vitally a part of it. Is not every experiment as much a test of the means employed as of the particular objects experimented upon? 4

Earlier in the course of this paper the demand of natural

4 On the conservatism of pure science, see an article, " Some Unscientific Reflections upon Science," Science, July 2, 1902.