Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/728

 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS

Sociology as Culture. The conspicuous trend of elections in this and other universities toward social studies whether these be called history, philosophy, economics, sociology, or what not suggests interesting speculations as to what may be the meaning of it, as to how this trend may be related to the general state of thought. Only a small part of these elections are made for technical reasons ; they do not, on the whole, express the tendency to specializa- tion with a view to a career. They express, beyond doubt, a search for something in the nature of culture : students look to these studies for breadth, for a richer and more comprehending life.

Somebody has said that culture is the rise of the individual into the life of the race ; and, if this is true, a social character must always have belonged to studies that yielded real culture. Why was Greek the word of culture from the early part of the fourteenth century to the latter part of the nineteenth? Evi- dently because it was the ark in which was preserved so much of the higher life of the race ; in mastering it a man passed from the narrow confines of mediaeval thought into something glad, free, and open ; it was like being let out of prison. Perhaps the classics still have more of this function to perform than we realize. It would be nonsense to assert that we have assimilated what is best in ancient culture, and it is quite possible that the decline we witness is in some degree transient. But, however this may be, it is clear that the classics flourished because they gave the individual a fuller membership in the life of mankind, and that social studies are now in vogue because they are believed to serve the same end.

The fact that the study of society may be culture is somewhat obscured per- haps by a certain technical character that the word " culture " has taken on in popular usage. Like all words that relate to the higher life, it tends to become incrusted with special associations that are not at all of its essence. Just as religion, to many people, means going to church and joining in the rites and formulae of certain traditional societies, so culture is bound up in a way almost as mechanical with a study, too often formal and uncomprehending, of languages and the fine arts. Because of the prevalence of this idea, and the shrewd percep- tion of plain people that such acquirements often have little meaning for real life, " culture " is regarded with some suspicion as an intellectual or aesthetic exercise having no necessary connection with generous personal development.

This suggests a consideration that goes far to explain the decline of many of the older instruments of culture and the rise of newer humanities ; namely, that culture in our day must be democratic, in the sense that the higher life which it embodies must not be the life of a privileged upper class shutting itself off from the common lot to cherish a private enjoyment, but something which makes for unity of spirit, excluding no one who has intrinsic fitness to receive it. It is partly because the art and literature of the schools are in a measure bound up with outworn ideals of society that young people find them somewhat unreal and unsatisfying, not expressive of the deeper facts of life as they feel them. Litera- ture and fine art must always have a large part in culture, but is it not true that new types of them must arise before they can regain the commanding place which, it would seem, properly belongs to them? We have some voices of men crying in the wilderness Walt Whitman, Tolstoi, Wagner, and others prophesying something of this sort, but not yet the adequate art and literature, still less the incorporation of these into education.

In the meantime an increasing number turn to studies which, however deficient in form and hilarity, do really aim to explore human life ; and in order not to speak of things which I know only at secondhand, I will leave others to expound the culture values of history, social philosophy, ethics, economics, and the rest, and point out what, from this point of view, the student seems to be looking for in sociology.

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