Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/696

 682 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

ranges of mathematical problems will be undertaken as long as conceivable variations of quantitative relations remain unex- plained. We shall enlarge the borders and rearrange the con- tents of our cosmologies as often as our processes of cosmic or atomic discovery bring new areas of greatness or littleness or complexness within our range of vision. Whether we shall arrive close to the goal or stop far from it, the mystery of life in the biological sense will be traced into every hiding-place which chemistry or physics in the service of physiology can penetrate; and whether we ever discover the origin of life or not, we shall never give up search for the connections between all the details which we can learn of its processes.

While these are truisms in connection with the physical world, we have not yet very generally recognized the equal cer- tainty that the human mind will set no arbitrary limits to its inquiries in social connections. My assertion that sociology had to be is by no means a confession of ignorance that people are still declaring it can never be. Indeed my judgment is, that we have not yet passed the point at which denial of the right of suffrage to sociology grows obstinate in direct ratio with the increasing force of our argument. In fact the sociological yeast is an active ferment in all modern thinking about human affairs. Whether in religion or politics, in ethnology or economics, the men who are not merely threshing the empty straw of ancient categories, the men who are producing live thought-stuff, are doing it with the assistance of concepts and of processes that are essentially sociological. Among the theorists, however, gen- eralizations of sociological concepts and processes, and claims that they are at least as valid as those of historiography or sta- tistics, still affect the larger part of the scientific world as symp- toms of mental aberration.

Twenty years ago this latter phase of the situation puzzled me. I had worked my way through the methodologies of the conventional social sciences, I had studied their briefs, so to speak, I had plotted the scope of their reasoning, but the more I thought over their programmes the more I was convinced that they had not exhausted the technique within our reach for inter-