Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/27

Rh their day, shown more affinity for what we now call the functional interpretation of society than the type of classifiers for whom Professor Ford speaks.

The jealousy which would smother sociology, in the interest of a programme of forcing all knowledge into cans, of form and caliber prescribed by an a priori schematology, is not science but decadence.

Fifth, No competent sociologist ever supposed that he had a technique which could be a substitute for adequate means of research already devised by other divisions of social science. No one who comprehends the sociological movement, and means to tell the truth, would be caught accusing the sociologists of trying to make facts and relations and programmes out of nothing by a method through the use of which sociologists claimed to be sufficient unto themselves. The precise opposite is not only assumed by the sociologists, but from the start they have labored to provoke all the can-openers for very shame to admit the like in their own cases. The sociologist has to take his physics and psychology, and ethnology, and history, and economics, as they are given to him by the present condition of those divisions of labor. If he makes mistakes of fact or of conclusion, they are probably not counts against sociology at all. They may justify true bills against the individual's patience and caution and sobriety. They may chiefly expose either the incompleteness of the older divisions of knowledge, or the inadequacy of the means of communication between scientific investigators.

Sixth, Sociology could afford to rest its expectation of vindication solely on its attorneyship for the motor aspects of knowledge. Knowledge that is knowledge only is an abortion. Knowledge is vital only when it is transformed into arterial sustenance for action. Here again sociology is neither a creator out of nothing nor a monopolist of the thing created. It has specialized more persistently than any other division of science upon the problem of making knowledge available for the guidance of