Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/743

 SCIENCE AND CITIZENSHIP 727

cians and physiologists to be doing what is at best a work of super- erogation, at worst an act of reprehensible wastefulness. The scientist of the physical or biological group regards it as much and as little a matter of scientific obligation to acquire the language of the sociological group as that of the Hottentots. What, then, amid this apparent confusion and disruptiveness of science, is the inquiring citizen to do, if he wishes to know the bearing of science on citizenship? The answer of science, as of every other spiritual power, is that there is only one way to know the doctrine, and that is to lead the life.

V. The scientific quality of citizenship can be apprehended only through the scientific conception of the city. And the first question which science asks about the city is : What is it?

What is a city? Legal arid political definitions we have, but seemingly no scientific ones as yet. Now, legal and political definitions, whether of cities or of other social phenomena, are, as it were, ready-made articles of common usage, alike popular and recondite. To the majority of scientists that is to say, those arrested at the mechanical stage of scientific thought such definitions are alternately meaningless mysteries to be scoffed at, or shibboleths naively adopted by these scientists themselves, whenever social action is unavoidable or social thought demand- ed. On the other hand, there is a small, but ever-increasing number of scientists who push on through the world of form with which the mathematical sciences deal, onward through the world of matter with which the physical sciences deal, and thence through the world of organic life with which the biological sciences deal ; and finally attempt to explore, in a scientific spirit and with scientific methods, the world of mind and society with which the psychological and social sciences deal. And this, as already stated, is the normal progress of the mind. We see it exemplified by most of the great leaders. We see it, for instance, in Helmholtz, who began his career as a mathematician, passed through that to physiology whence it was but a single step into psychology : and in the later period of his life he interested him- self most in education and social questions. The same tendency