Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/699

 SOCIOLOGICAL STAGE IN SOCIAL SCIENCES 685

I should be glad to give credit for this to whom it is due, if there were any way to award the merit. It is at all events a product of sophisticated naturalism dislodging bewildered mys- ticism. The ungraded school of life has itself predisposed everybody to the functional interpretation. Darwinism was one of its graded lessons, psychology is another, sociology is another. However we may scale causal efficiency among these concurrent factors, the base line of all positive reckoning today is the con- viction, more or less consciously formulated, that everything is, and everything is worth, what it works.

My second commonplace is that among the things to be inter- preted by the function which they perform are the social sciences. Everybody assumes that the social sciences discharge a function of some sort, or they would be intolerable.

Thereupon a third commonplace becomes pertinent, namely, that the same agency often performs several functions, and as a particular case in point the social sciences are charged with both pedagogical and investigative functions.

In this connection I find one of the chief obstacles to a com- plete audit of the account of the social sciences. Speaking gen- erally, social scientists of all sorts are, first and foremost, teach- ers. Whether their chief interest ends with teaching or not, as a rule their activities move within a radius which the teacher's vocation prescribes. The content of the several social sciences tends accordingly to take a form which is convenient for the classroom. More than that, it tends to take a form which runs conventional lines between material convenient for one classroom and material convenient for other classrooms. Still further, the men in the several classrooms naturally grow sensitive about the prestige of the functions of their own classroom, and by just so much they become disqualified for objective estimates of the relative importance of their own classroom function and that of social science as a whole. In particular they lose ability to enter- tain the idea that the ratio of value which their respective func- tions may have in the pedagogical process may not be identical with the ratio of their value in the investigative process.

In this paper I am neither challenging the pedagogical prestige