Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/658

 642 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

far-sighted expediency judgments which neither unreasonably discount the future and the unintended result, nor excessively regard the clamorous interests of the immediate actors, and which are so general in their application as to forearm man to meet the vicissitudes in which he must play his part. Only the few are able to make any valuable contribution toward the equipment of duty- judgments prevalent in the society of which they are members. After these judgments of the wisest, most far-sighted and con- structive minds have become traditionally accepted rules of duty, they are enforced by priests, potentates, and teachers of a lesser caliber. These enforce the traditionally accepted duty-code of their society by appeal to every conceivable sanction natural and supernatural, enforce them by the smiles and frowns that greet the earliest choices and impulsive acts of childhood, enforce them by the continuous pressure of the social approvals and disapprovals in which we are immersed as in an atmosphere, enforce them by the self-approval and remorse that turn in upon ourselves the judgments which we have learned to pass upon others, and enforce them, and at the same time explain them after the manner of the prescientific metaphysical stage of thought, by calling them instincts of our nature, finger-marks of God, corollaries deduced from the nature of the absolute. There is a true sense in which every broad and far-sighted judgment of expediency is a corollary of the nature of things, even though man has derived his knowl- edge of that law of conduct experimentally from his own failures and successes, and not from antecedent knowledge of the absolute nor from implanted instinct. It is the business of sociology, not to bar the path of investigation with a metaphysical abstraction, with a big word instead of an explanation, a stone offered to the hunger of the mind, but to investigate, that is, to apply the methods of science to answering the question : Whence come the traditionally accepted and socially enforced judgments of conduct; why do they differ in different eras and in different societies; and how, from having first prescribed duties only toward the members of the group within which they arose, leaving liberty to steal with a clear conscience, or even with a sense of merit, the property or the wife or the head of any member of another group, do they finally