Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/709

 SOCIOLOGICAL STAGE IN SOCIAL SCIENCES 695

of significance for systematic theory which they attribute to the substance of a single one of them. I venture to say, however, that some rendering and arrangement of these commonplaces is in the mind of each member of all the associations that have been meeting together here this week. For this reason their thinking differs from the social theorizing of half a century ago as dis- tinctly as the American type of popular political thinking differs from the German, Moreover the sort of thinking toward which these different commbnplaces converge is the focus of sociology. Instead of being a meteorite shot from no one knows where into the social sciences, sociology was always latent in the logic of social interpretation. Wherever there is a flood there must be a fluid, and eventually a physics and chemistry of that fluid. Soci- ology is merely crystallizing elements that were already in the minds of all social scientists, and it is merely making higher- power lenses of the crystals for sharper scrutiny of experience. I apply these propositions particularly to the last of the commonplaces which I have scheduled. What is a "human value" ? In what sense is there an "evolution of human values" ? Is there a standard of "human values"? Can the evolution of human values be measured? No two of us may be able precisely to agree upon answers. But whenever I hear able men trying to express the most fundamental things in their minds, I find that they are all stammering out some sort of statement that life must get its last rating from what it lodges in the make-up of people. For example, every speaker at Carnegie Hall last Mon- day evening sounded that note each in his own key. If I under- stand the sociological movement at all, this is the substance of its case. It refuses to believe, or to leave others undisturbed in acting as though they believed that there is no center of orienta- tion from which to reckon the meaning of human experience. It refuses to believe that the human lot is a confusion of unrelated phenomena. It demands a final accounting of all our social sci- ences in terms of what is taking place not only around men, but in men, and finding its terminus in men. It maintains that this is not alone the only intelligible center of calculation for human ex- perience but it is the only convincing measure of the relative value