Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/18

 4 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

are not amateurs, they are not Philistines, they are not rank out- siders. Man for man they know the inside of one or more of the social sciences from which they have come up out of great tribulation, quite as familiarly as the smug sectarians who resent departure from the standing order. Indeed, the vindication of sociology may, I am quite ready to admit, never come to soci- ology by name at all. Sociology may come to its own eventually in future forms of the social sciences developed out of the present crude technologies by men who will have the essential spirit of the present sociological movement, without adopting its name. At all events, both within the conventional social sciences, and in a growing number of cases in positions of their own co-ordinate in rank with that of the older disciplines, men are at work adapting the programme of social investigation to the pri- mary perceptions which are reducing anarchy to order in the sciences.

In other words, partly within and partly without the tra- ditional social sciences, there is a methodological agitation, which we have called "the sociological movement," which consciously or unconsciously starts from the premise that the outlook and the procedure of our academic sciences have been made partially obsolete by types and results of scientific analysis and synthesis which we accept in the abstract, which we have not co-ordinated, and the meaning of which for earlier scientific presumptions we have not recognized.

To express briefly the present scientific conception of the problems of knowledge, we have come to a point at which it is not unsafe to predict that the tendency, for an indefinite period, is likely to be toward clearer defining of the knowable in terms of increasingly complex processes of physical causation, and then of these processes involved with progressively complex processes of psychical causation. In so far as it is necessary or useful to divide these connected processes, we may say in the rough that, in the order of complexity, our knowledge problems are, first those of physics (of course in a broader than the technical sense), second, those of psychology (also in a wider than the technical sense).