Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/777

 SCIENCE AND CITIZENSHIP 761

the teachers and professors, the moralists and priests. Which among all these are the seculars of social science? which the per- sistent survivals of the pre-scientific age?

XXIX. To answer these questions, we must ask: What vision is seen by psychologist and sociologist in their cosmic or naturalist mood, and what in their humanist mood? What po- tencies do they see in social evolution, in city development? What groups, if any, of more militant type are inspired by these visions of social potency, to work toward the realization of the corresponding ideals? In reply, little can be said at the close of an already prolonged paper. The sociologist in his naturalist mood sees the city as successive strata of wreckage and survivals of past phases in the endlessly changing antics of a building and hibernating mammalian species. In his humanist mood he sees somewhat dimly, it must be confessed the city, as the culminating and continuous effort of the race to determine the mastery of its fate, to achieve a spiritual theater for the free play of the highest racial ideals. In short, the cities of the world are in this view but processes of realizing the spiritual potency of the human race. They are the true homes of humanity. And it is just here, where science whose mission it is to fulfil, and not to destroy reveals to us the germ of truth in the popular sentiment, which insists that the essential char- acteristic of the city resides in the university and the cathedral. The truth, to be sure, is that it is the presence of functional institutions of the highest spiritual type, whether or not we call them university and cathedral, that differentiates the city from the town. It follows that the civic policy of our secular sociologists if we have any must be concerned with the city as itself a cultural potency, and with the whole body of citizens as individuals responsive to the creative influences of the spir- itual ideals, active or latent in drama and poetry, in art and music, in history and science, in philosophy and religion. The most comprehensive abstract and general statement of culture policy from the sociological standpoint still probably remains that made more than half a century ago by Comte in the Positive Polity which was really the Utopia of his later thought, educated and matured by the preliminary preparation of the