Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/612

 596 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

same sense as the skilled workman's product is like the workman ; "nothing is found in the effect that was not contained in the cause," in much the same manner.

These dicta are, of course, older than modern science, but it is only in the early days of modern science that they come to rule the field with an unquestioned sway and to push the higher grounds of dialectical validity to one side. They invade even the highest and most recondite fields of speculation, so that at the approach to the transition from the early-modern to the late- modern period, in the eighteenth century, they determine the out- come even in the counsels of the theologians. The deity, from having been in mediaeval times primarily a suzerain concerned with the maintenance of his own prestige, becomes primarily a creator engaged in the workmanlike occupation of making things useful for man. His relation to man and the natural universe is no longer primarily that of a progenitor, as it is in the lower barbarian culture, but rather that of a talented mechanic. The "natural laws" which the scientists of that era make so much of are no longer decrees of a preternatural legislative authority, but rather details of the workshop specifications handed down by the master-craftsman for the guidance of handicraftsmen working out his designs. In the eighteenth-century science these natural laws are laws specifying the sequence of cause and effect, and will bear characterization as a dramatic interpretation of the activity of the causes at work, and these causes are conceived in a quasi- personal manner. In later modern times the formulations of causal sequence grow more impersonal and more objective, more matter-of-fact; but the imputation of activity to the observed objects never ceases, and even in the latest and maturest formula- tions of scientific research the dramatic tone is not wholly lost. The causes at work are conceived in a highly impersonal way, but hitherto no science (except ostensibly mathematics) has been con- tent to do its theoretical work in terms of inert magnitude alone. Activity continues to be imputed to the phenomena with which science deals ; and activity is, of course, not a fact of observation, but is imputed to the phenomena by the observer. 9 This is, also

Epistemologically speaking, activity is imputed to phenomena for the pur- pose of organizing them into a dramatically consistent system.