Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/708

 694 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

sneering at one of the diameters of the expansion of the human mind. We either never reach that stage or we must pass through it to attain a larger diameter. The philosophers of history tried to give a final value to something which we may express as a thir- teenth commonplace, namely, that the human lot is an incessant intersection of processes. Their formulas were unconvincing. We shall never end the matter by throwing up the attempt to find connections between the processes that make up experience. Con- nections are there. We are bound to follow out clues to them so long as anything within the range of experience remains un- articulated in our thought with the rest of experience.

Passing over the wide space that separates the viewpoint of the philosophers of history from our present outlook, I cite as the fourteenth commonplace — and the last which I will label as such — that the whole process which the experience of man is filling out is the evolution of human values.

I have not assembled these commonplaces as links in a syl- logistic chain, I am not urging that the first commonplace neces- sarily gives forth the second, and the second the third, and so on to the logically indisputable conclusion, therefore sociology. On the contrary this is my point : When the plain people get it into their heads that there is something wrong about our American way of making a tariff, for instance, there is presently going to be a different way of making a tariff. It may not be an alto- gether better way. It may not be a final way, but a different way it will be; and its differences will correspond, for better or for worse, with the variations of the new way of thinking from the old way of thinking. Now we may generalize this concrete instance. When the old ways of thinking human experience in the large no longer satisfy our ways of looking at life as it is, the interpretations are bound to change. Our thought about life grows with life itself. New soundings in experience make new schedules to report the soundings.

.Nor do I mean that these commonplaces are household words in the form in which I have expressed them. Not many people knowingly put them into words of any sort. Those who do word them do not word them alike. Few entirely agree upon the ratio