Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/28

14 social conduct. To say that we may summon from the historians and moralists and political philosophers and economists a great cloud of witnesses that knowledge is of no use until it is applied, robs sociology of no laurels. Does anyone discover a danger that knowledge will apply itself too fast in rationalizing the world's conduct? Is there no room for specializing as admonisher of men that knowledge is at hand which our social programmes have not assimilated? Both the Verein für Socialpolitik in 1871, and the American Economic Association in 1885 projected the motor impulse into social science in a salutary way. Without disparaging either movement, it must be pointed out that there was in each a certain hiatus between the dynamic sentiment of the organization, and the dynamic knowledge necessary to give the sentiment lasting force. Sociology has done no mean service in calling for organization of that sentiment into a system which shall rely for support upon functional psychology.

In a nutshell, our whole elaborate scientific liturgy of life no more fits the reality which we encounter when we freely inspect human experience, than Calvin's Institutes reflect the moral order in which modern men believe. The sociological movement is fundamentally a resolve to learn life from life, not to take a version of it on the authority of a pseudo-scientific liturgy. The sociological movement begins whenever men part company with the Weltanschauung that life is a department store stocked with original packages of assorted stuff. The sociological movement gets a character of its own as fast as it brings into distinct focus the substitute Weltanschauung which the process conception of life throws on the screen. The nearest that we are likely to get for a long time to literalism in our social sciences will be in rendering the on-goings of the life-process in some variation of these terms: Everything that occurs among men is a certain reaction of the physical forces; beyond that it is more distinctively evolving processes first of knowing, then of feeling or judgment valuations, in view of concurrently evolving purposes, and of choices converging toward those purposes.

The only possible vindication for an intellectual movement is that people after a while find themselves thinking its way. It is as