Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/749

 SCIENCE AND CITIZENSHIP 733

which attributes city rank to a town that possesses a university? That, to be sure, would be a criterion of civic status unrecognized by, and unknown to, the lawyer and the politician. But univer- sities are not institutions that appeal to juristic and political minds. In Russia the state corrects academic exuberance by occasional application of the military musket and the police baton ; in India, by proscribing progressive literature ; in England, by the more subtle processes of financial starvation. There is in the normal undergraduate mind a youthful ardor which is highly re- sistant to the juristic ideals which lawyers and politicians call stability, and physiologists call ossification. Is, then, this popular conception of the civic importance of the university a useful start- ing-point for the sociological investigator? In any case, it is a well-recognized truth that popular conceptions are, for science, more convenient points of departure than culture ones, since they are nearer to that naked and unadorned order of nature to which the scientist must constantly return for the verification of his thought.

IX. Assuming, then, as a provisional criterion, the possession of a university as a determinant of civic status, we have in the university cities of the world 236 objects which actually exist in time and space. Here is an abundance of concrete objects for observation, without which the scientific investigator, whether of cities or of other phenomena, cannot get to work at all. His methods, as he is apt somewhat wearisomely to remind us, are those of observation and classification, by comparison, general- ization, prediction, and verification by return to the concrete. To put it most briefly, the method of science differs from the method of other orders of thought in the necessity for arranging the vari- ous stages of investigation in such a way that two possibilities are always open. In the first place, it must be possible for every member of the scientific fraternity, present and future, to retrace and repeat every vital step in any and every investigation, from simple concrete observation right up to the largest generalization. In the second place, it must be possible to return from the largest generalization, the loftiest aspiration, back to the concrete facts