Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/16

 2 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

prejudice. The climax of sociology's misdoings is found in Professor Simon N. Patten's address at Atlantic City last De- cember, when he was speaking as president of The American Economic Association!

Assuming, as a preface to the present argument, the editorial above referred to, we take Professor Ford's article as occasion for discussing the question, What sort of vindication is coming to sociology?

Instead of attempting to answer the question by direct reply to the various types of misconstruction packed into Professor Ford's paper, we prefer to restate the meaning of the sociological movement. The vindication of sociology will appear, not in discovery of specific facts, nor in adoption of particular plans, still less in the attainment of a pedestal upon which sociology may pose in solitary state. It will come in eventual adjustment by the social sciences, and by social practice, to the conception of social relations which sociology represents.

Whether or not he meant just what we must put into the words today, Comte was close to a crucial truth, more intelli- gible now than at his time, when he said, two-thirds of a cen- tury ago :

It cannot be necessary to prove to anybody who reads this work that ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos; in other words, that all social mechanism rests upon opinions. The great political and moral crises that societies are now undergoing is shown, by a rigid analysis, to arise out of intellectual anarchy. While stability in fundamental maxims is the first condition of genuine social order, we are suffering from an utter disagreement which may be called universal. Till a certain number of general ideas can be acknowledged as a rallying-point of social doctrine, the nations will remain in a revolutionary state, whatever palliatives may be devised; and their institutions can only be provisional. But whenever the necessary agreement on first principles can be obtained, appropriate institutions will issue from them, without shock or resistance; for the causes of disorder will have been arrested by the mere fact of the agree- ment. It is in this direction that those must look who desire a natural and regular, a normal state of society.*

The substratum of meaning, which Comte was not late enough to put in full force into his quasi-prophetic language, is

•Pos. Phil., chap. i.