Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/705

 SOCIOLOGICAL STAGE IN SOCIAL SCIENCES 691

that science itself must tend into equally mechanical grooves unless more vital correlations can be substituted for these clumsy assortings. Is there some common denominator, some meridian or equator, some solar ascension or lunar declination, by means of which to give these vagrants a place, an orbit, and a propor- tionality with reference to one another? If so, who knows about it, and what prospect is in sight that it will be used to make social investigation coherent? What relation, for example, have the researches under title i to those under title 17, and in what way does this relation in actual practice affect researches under the other titles? Is it, or is it not true, that investigation in these fields at present fails to correct its abstraction of problems by reconstructing them as factors of the whole social movement which gives them their value?

Commonplace number eight now ventures to testify, namely, the more recurrent and the less transitory the relations investi- gated, the more universal and the less parochial the part they play, the greater their importance in explaining things as they are.

Our scientific code has not yet sufficiently penalized inversion of this order. During my first semester at Berlin, in a course on the history of Greek philosophy. Professor Zeller devoted his lecture hour for three successive days to the question whether Socrates was born in the four hundred and seventieth or the four hundred and sixty-ninth or the four hundred and seventy-first year before Christ. I have yet to learn that it makes a particle of difference to Greek philosophy which date is correct; yet this sort of pedantry is still held before young scholars as exemplary, while the business man who made equally wasteful use of his capital would find it hard to fight an appeal to the courts for the appointment of a conservator. Whether or not Nero fiddled while Rome was burning, or Elizabeth deserved the title of "virgin queen," or Napoleon was less responsible than Grouchy for the fate of Waterloo, is the sort of question fit to furnish a story for the yellow journals. What is worth finding out is the meaning of Nero or Elizabeth or Naix)leon each as an index of the effect of previous conjunctions of social forces, and as a cause of fur- ther rearrangements of social relations.