Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/659

 SOCIOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION LINES 643

extend in scope till they inculcate the universal brotherhood of man? And sociology must approach in the scientific spirit not only the question : Have existing moral judgments a natural his- tory, and, if so, how can it be traced ? but also the further ques- tion : Do these existing moral requirements actually prescribe the wisest judgments of expediency; and, if not, can they be amended so as better to reveal the method of more complete and harmonious experience within the conditions of actual society? If the pre- vailing judgments of value have a natural history, it is a history of social evolution; if progress in the formation of such judg- ments is still possible, what else can that progress be than the discovery of the method of the conditioning of experience, all of which is socially conditioned, and all of which in turn constitutes the social conditions?

Everyone admits that hypothetical imperatives are inductions from experience. The sociologist has nothing to do with any but hypothetical imperatives. And he should proceed upon the hypothesis that all the rational imperatives governing human action, when thoroughly understood, will be seen to be hypothet- ically justified; that is, they will be seen to prescribe the means to an end that is worth while an end the worth of which can be apprehended by men, value to be realized in human experience. Either this is true, or human life is necessarily a sacrifice to a world-end outside of man ; or else it has no rational end, and life is a nightmare, and the search for a reasoned law of conduct is vain. No one is justified in adopting the pessimistic conclusion that the conscious life of man has no rational end, nor the semi- pessimistic conclusion that man's earthly experience has no end in itself, and no meaning save as a part of a larger world-order that is beyond the scope of human observation, until the attempt to discover the end in human experience has been exhausted and has failed. No one shall warn us off from that attempt.

Moreover, even though there be also an end attained by human life which is not in human life, certain it is that there are values in human experience. If they do not constitute the whole of the rational end of human action, they are at least a definite and highly important class of phenomena, the complex and peculiar