Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/614

 598 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

tific knowledge for useful ends in technology, in the broad sense in which the term includes, besides the machine industry proper, such branches of practice as engineering 1, agriculture, medicine, sanitation, and economic reforms. The reason why scientific theories can be turned to account for these practical ends is not that these ends are included in the scope of scientific inquiry. These useful purposes lie outside the scientist's interest. It is not that he aims, or can aim, at technological improvements. His inquiry is as "idle" as that of the Pueblo myth-maker. But the canons of validity under whose guidance he works are those im- posed by the modern technology, through habituation to its re- quirements; and therefore his results are available for the tech- nological purpose. His canons of validity are made for him by the cultural situation ; they are habits of thought imposed on him by the scheme of life current in the community in which he lives ; and under modern conditions this scheme of life is largely machine-made. In the modern culture, industry, industrial pro- cesses, and industrial products have progressively gained upon humanity, until these creations of man's ingenuity have latterly come to take the dominant place in the cultural scheme ; and it is not too much to say that they have become the chief force in shap- ing men's daily life, and therefore the chief factor in shaping men's habits of thought. Hence men have learned to think in the terms in which the technological processes act. This is particu- larly true of those men who by virtue of a peculiarly strong susceptibility in this direction become addicted to that habit of matter-of-fact inquiry that constitutes scientific research.

Modern technology makes use of the same range of concepts, thinks in the same terms, and applies the same tests of validity as modern science. In both, the terms of standardization, validity, and finality are always terms of impersonal sequence, not terms of human nature or of preternatural agencies. Hence the easy copartnership between the two. Science and technology play into one another's hands. The processes of nature with which science deals and which technology turns to account, the sequence of changes in the external world, animate and inanimate, run in terms of brute causation, as do the theories of science. These