Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/697

 SOCIOLOGICAL STAGE IN SOCIAL SCIENCES 683

preting social relations. It was incredible to me then that anyone could have considered the same evidence without arriving at my conclusion. Today it would tempt me to revive the miracle hypothesis if I found many people so soon accepting a point of view which throws everything that men of my age were taught in the schools into a changed perspective. The mind of the race does not work that way. On the contrary it is a leisurely cir- cumlocution office. Even in our rapid day its pace is not so much accelerated that it is easy for us to be sure that it moves at all in our direction. It has boundless capacity for receiving reports of commissions, and for pigeon-holing them as securely as mummies entombed in the pyramids.

But we do change our mind. The reality in the world's ex- perience forces us constantly to revise our preconceptions. For the encouragement of younger men, I am glad to say that the sociologists of my generation can hardly credit their memories when they contrast the present influence of sociology with the ap- parent hopelessness two or three decades ago. Our social sciences as a whole are in a stage parallel with that of the natural sci- ences when they were still marking time in the footprints of Lin- naeus and Cuvier while beginning to talk the language of Darwin. The whole world is using terms of the process conception of life, while only here and there one has begun to suspect what the phraseology means for the social sciences. Whether sociology has had much or little to do with this change of the world's vocabulary, the concepts which compel the use of these pregnant signs had long before begotten sociology. Under some name or other it was bound to establish itself, unless men stopped tracing the connections of things in human experience. The texture of life foreordains the sociological phase of social science as unalterably as quantity relations foreordained algebra in the evolution of mathematics.

It has occured to me therefore that the inevitableness of soci- ology might be made clearer even to ourselves, and still more to others into whose hands our proceedings might fall, if I should dispense with technicalities as far as possible, and call attention to a few things which no investigator of human relations can