Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/710

 696 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

of the different details of experience — an awfully inexact measure I admit, a measure that is as elastic as human judgment, still such as it is the most defensible measure that has ever been applied to human affairs, as a least common denominator of many incomparables. It is a measure not of the present force but of the essential worth of things, namely, what part do they play in promoting the largest process we can discover, the realiza- tion of the attainable in persons?

You may have noticed that I included sociology itself in my assertion that the social sciences tend on the one hand to become a decomposition of emphases. Now that I have stated what seems to me the central meaning of the sociological movement, I want to utter the warning which I had in mind in that form of statement. The sociological viewpoint has thrown the search- light upon many passages of human experience which had been obscure and neglected before. It has already brought into being a generation of new sciences almost as independent of one another as the social sciences of the older type. I will not prophesy, I will simply utter a caution. There is in these newer sociological sciences the same potentiality of sterile dissociation which was one of the fatalities of the older types. Although these newer sciences are phases of the view of things which we obtain from the sociological outlook, the time may easily come when we shall have so far pursued the special investigations on which these new sciences have started that we shall have left our point of orientation out of sight. There will then be needed the same sort of recall to themselves, and of summons to orient them- selves with reference to their real focus which the sociological factor in our present social sciences primarily represents. Even if it were vain to hope for specific results from the special socio- logical sciences, general sociology would still mark an epoch in the development of insight into human experience. The crucial element in sociology is not a particular discovery, but insistence upon the normative principle that not specialization but correla- tion shall always be the terminal stage in the scientific process.

The gist of the whole matter, as I see it, is this : It would he a boon to interpretation of human experience if we could rise up