Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/661

 SOCIOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION LINES 645

values of human experience in their completeness and harmony is an object of scientific quest, and likewise the laws of conduct tending toward that end are as much so as the laws of condition- ing of any other phenomena. Such conduct and experience must be social conduct and experience; its conditioning must be social conditioning; such life must be socially realized; such science must be sociology science in the sense which these papers try to explain. Though it is true that the logical processes are the same in all science, yet the application of them must be adapted to the nature of the phenomena investigated. The sciences of the psychic can never enter upon the Blutezeit, prophesied by Wundt and Haeckel, until sociologists cease merely to carry over the mental habits developed by studies of the non-psychic, and to test the scientific character of their work merely by comparing it with the work of physicists and biologists. Forgetting those things that are behind, yet remembering all things that are behind, they must press toward the mark of a higher calling. They must avoid the strabismus that is due to looking with one eye at the physical while they look with the other at the psychic, focus attention upon psychic phenomena, find in them their problems and see what these phenomena are, not what they resemble, what courses of investigation they require, not how far the devices of investigation developed by other sciences can be applied to them. Then ethics, the study of life, may pass, as the study of material phenomena has passed, from the metaphysical into the scientific stage. Who would obstruct the endeavor to speed the day, or despair before the effort has been fairly made?

Motives to right conduct deduced from notions of the absolute have only a speculative foundation save as the name " absolute " is given to doctrines derived by induction from experience of life. It may be true, as we are warned, that sanctions of authority are crumbling away. If so, we must hope that the demands of authority will be reaffirmed or replaced by the motives of enlight- enment.

[To be continued}