Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/264

 248 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

must continue to make improvements upon themselves, is both dutiful and pleasant.

My point, possibly not yet clear, is just this. Science has its message, its doctrinal formulae, its discovered knowledge about the world in which we live, and through this message it serves ethical inquiry in a practical way, supplying something actual and concrete, imparting realistic information, but it has also more than this and serves life in another way. Indeed, knowledge itself, or information, or consciousness generally, is not some- thing we simply have about us, as we have money in our pockets or treasures on a shelf ; it is functional, or organic, to our whole nature. Thus, besides standing for intellectual discoveries it stands also for the development of acquired activities into appre- ciated powers or instruments, the aforesaid " instruments of sci- ence." These instruments, too, are not merely those to be found in a laboratory; they comprise also the various developed condi- tions of social and personal life. Thus, there is psychological or sociological as well as historical significance in the fact that an age of scientific investigation is always an age of conventionalism and utilitarianism, an age, then, in which forms, rites, conditions of personal and social organization, are becoming mere utilities, just as there is psychological, not merely biographical significance in the fact that any individual, turned reflective and studious, leads a life in the world of things and affairs, a practical life, that is perfunctory and mechanical, or, in other words, only instru- mental. An age of science, then, is one in which life's developed activities, or modes of special organization, are getting into use. To begin with, these activities are used for exploration, in investi- gation, and the like, but in the end, their development into utilities becoming even more complete, they are the appropriated means to a new mode of life, perhaps a new civilization. History seems to move by the institutes of one era becoming the instruments of the next, and the changes thus indicated are an important part of the reply to the problem of conduct.

It would be interesting at this point to discuss in detail some, or even all, of the different forms of life's machines that have just been brought to mind. The methods and instruments of