Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/707

 SOCIOLOGICAL STAGE IN SOCIAL SCIENCES 693

fines, and starves human powers. So of each law, each business custom, each social institution. It operates both as spur and as clog to human motions. Since such things as these recur in human experience, another generalization of demands upon science is unavoidable. We have the eleventh commonplace, that there is the visible reality of social processes. They play a part in human affairs. To find out all about these processes — what they do and why they do it — is a necessary stage in our inquiry into the mean- ing of human life. It follows again that if this phase of the human reality has been slurred over it must be brought up into the reckoning, and that meanwhile all conclusions about human rela- tions must be regarded as premature until sufficient investigation of the social processes has been made to prove that we have not been mistaking appearance for reality in some parts of our inter- pretations.

Philosophers have debated time out of mind whether food makes man or man makes food; whether economic institutions make laborers or laborers make economic institutions; whether laws make citizens or citizens make laws. We have now gone far enough to see that life is not an affair of such simple alternatives. We see that life is not a succession in a straight line of causes and effects. On the contrary nothing is altogether cause, nothing is altogether effect, everything is in a state of perpetual reciprocation with everything else, now appearing more as acting, now more as acted upon, or probably at the same time in some of its mani- festations more as molding and in others more as molded.

This insight gives our twelfth commonplace, namely, that all the human processes are parts of a concurrent process. This com- monplace gave the philosophers of history their problem. With a common impulse they asked, "What is that whole of which we see details ?" They speculated. They dogmatized. They assumed aprioris and theorized known facts into conformity with the assumptions. With Bossuet, for instance, the human whole was a superhuman whole — a divine plan progressively unfolding. With Schelling, the finite reality was an infinite reality — the self- evolution of the absolute. It is the fashion nowadays to sneer at the philosophers of history, but in following the fashion we are