Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/776

 760 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

bers of a community, to escape the penalties of nescience, is to normalize their own defects and to postulate a universal ignorance. This protective device of the cunning animal is nowhere more frequent than in discussions of the problem of heredity. It is frequently asserted that we know nothing at all of heredity with precision and certainty. It is quite true that the biologists and psychologists have a great deal still to learn about heredity. But it is equally true that they have a great deal to teach. And the citizen as well as the student can escape the charge of hopeless obscurantism only by promptly putting himself to this school. One of the first things he will learn is the deep significance and the practical importance of the distinction between what is called organic inheritance and what is called social inheritance. The former is concerned with the heritage that comes to us in organic descent from our family stock, i.e., the prenatal influences which condition our life. The latter is concerned with the qualities and aptitudes that come to us through training and education, through tradition and experience; in a word through the potential, and therefore social, influences that condition our life. Small or great as may be the ordered and verified knowledge accumulated by the students of organic inheritance, there can be no question of the mere massiveness and quantity of our knowledge of social inheritance and social variation in a word, of social evolution. Where is all the knowledige to be found? Who are its guardians and continu- ators? Are they not called historians and economists, political philosophers and comparative jurists, anthropologists and folk- lorists, psychologists and aestheticists, students of ethics and of comparative religion? Are not all the foregoing of the nature of regular orders engaged in studying the various aspects of our social heritage of industry and commerce, of law and morals, of religion and art, of language and literature, of science and philosophy? But the question for us is: Are these the regulars of social science? If they are not, who and where are the regulars of social science? who and where the seculars? Occupied on the practical side of our social life are the merchants and the manufacturers, the politicians and the law- yers, the journalists and orators, the artists and literary -men,