Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/700

 686 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

of the other social sciences, nor am I pleading for a larger place for sociology in our curricula. Neither for the purposes of this paper nor for any other purpose would I question the right of any social science to all the chance it has gained in our academic programmes. Nor am I prepared to contend that our academic division of labor and distribution of the material of instruction in the social sciences do not correspond, as well as our present pedagogical knowledge would enable us to make them correspond, with the gradations of pupils' qualifications for the successive stages of analysis and generalization involved in progressive in- terpretation of human experience. Whether this latter is the case or not is a capital question for scientific pedagogy, but it would be foolish to make it turn upon any present issue between soci- ology and other sciences. The argument of this paper calls for complete abstraction from our pedagogical interests, and for entirely objective consideration of the interests of research. It is of course true that purely scientific results are bound to react upon pedagogical programmes. It is, however, an incidental plati- tude thrown in for good measure among the platitudes in the more direct course of my argument, that no man is loyal to his function as a scholar who allows mental reservations about pos- sible effects upon his pedagogical interests to hamper investiga- tion.

My fourth commonplace then is, that the function of the social sciences as a whole is primarily to make out the meaning of human experience. Whatever by-products the social sciences may throw off, they are bound first of all to be the interpreters of the human world to the human world. Their lesser services may aggregate no matter how great value, if they are not steadily enlarging the boundaries and deepening the foundations and en- riching the contents of men's knowledge of themselves they are missing their chief calling. The question, "What does it all mean?" is not less the order of the day than when the first myth- makers gave the first answers. We have read most of the myth out of some of our world, and some of the myth out of most of our world, but all of us live in mythland still. It is merely a matter of where, apd of what sort, and of how much. The