Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/740

 724 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

science for her children are slow of formulation, that is because of the slow evolution of science itself. Arrested at the cosmic stage of thought, the majority of scientists do not recapitulate, with sufficient completeness, the racial evolution of the group to which they belong. Such racial recapitulation is, as has been well said, nature's way of preparing for a fresh start. And unless, therefore, the individual scientist, in his own personal de- velopment, passes on from the cosmic, physical, or naturalist phase, to the humanist and idealist phase, he does not undergo the preparation necessary to enable him to contribute to the ad- vancement of science in its proper historical evolution. In this arrestment of the development of most individual scientists is doubtless to be found an explanation of the slow evolution of the humanist or sociologist sciences.

If we understand by spiritual power a set of established beliefs like Mohammedanism, Romanism, journalism influencing conduct and determining the mode of life, then we must say of science that it is an incipient rather than an actual spiritual power. In this sense there are sciences, but no science. If we look around us among our contemporaries, we should, most of us, have to search far before finding an individual whose life and conduct are unified by science. Notable examples are, to be sure, numerous in history such as Lavoisier and Condorcet, Helm- holtz and Pasteur, Darwin and Clifford; and, if it is permissible to cite living scientists, Berthelot and Haeckel, Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. Similar, though less notable, contemporary in- stances are not common ; though in all probability they are more numerous in the obscure annals of university and academy, museum and library, than most of us imagine. There are many whose lives are unified by religion, still more by marriage, and not a few by Monte Carlo. But the truth is that as yet science has afforded no rounded doctrine of humanity sufficiently simple and facile for the comprehension of the artisan, the rustic, and the cabinet minister. The difficulty of that achievement lies mainly in the natural-history fact that the scien- tific habit of mind in the observation of social phenomena, though