Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/702

 688 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

trative bodies working at cross purposes. In a crisis therefore it might turn out that one body had located ships where they were not needed, or where there were neither provisions nor ammunition; another body had stored suppHes where there were no ships ; another had failed to provide officers or crews sufficient to man the ships; and still another had built the ships in such a way that they were no match for the ships of the enemy. In order to have a navy we need a central correlating body that would have no partiality for any particular wheel within the wheels of the sea-fighting machine, but would rate each factor of administration and equipment at its proportional value for the total function of naval effectiveness. If everything that has been said about the contrast between what we have and what we need for a navy were true, our navy would still not be in so bad a way as our social sciences considered as a machinery for investi- gating human experience.

The programmes which we call social "sciences" are merely a chaos of elective curiosities. Consequently, instead of an organized function of social interpretation, we have a discordant medley of emphases and techniques. They pay as little attention to one another as they please, and their total output is accordingly a bewildering concourse of heterogeneities. Their effect is not to interpret human experience, but to make it a thousand fold more unintelligible than if this orgy of incontinent specialization had never silenced common-sense. Whatever our definitions, anthropology, ethnology, history, economics, political science, jurisprudence, psychology, and now sociology — each as it works out — is not only an emphasis, but it threatens to be an uncon- trolled decomposition of emphases. Nearly every individual who bears the generic title which goes with one of these chief emphases invents his own private emphasis, as distinctive as his counte- nance or his bookplate, and makes his investigation regardless of whether it has any special relevancy to the investigation of any- body else.

The alleged "science" of a given time and place may be a mere fashion in emphases. One does not need to take very long or wide views in the history of science to discover that these