Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/711

 SOCIOLOGICAL STAGE IN SOCIAL SCIENCES 697

in our might and destroy the whole miserable trumpery of me- chanical partitions between social sciences, and leave ourselves in the stark presence of social problems. We should then no longer confuse issues by incessantly demanding of one another : Are you of psychology, or of history, or of economics, or of sociology? We should at least keep a little nearer to reality by inquiring: Have you a problem? What is it? How do you go about it? How do you connect it up with all the other problems that are closing in on the mystery of life?

We are not likely to adopt such heroic treatment, if for no other reason, because it would leave us without pedagogical line- fences. ' What is the alternative? I confess I used to have visions of sociologists functioning as a general staff, directing the movements of the social sciences. That now seems to me as undesirable as it is impossible. The desirable and the probable thing seems to me this: There will always be men of vision, whatever their special problems, who keep in mind the large out- look indicated by the sort of commonplaces I have recited. They will tend to function more and more as an unofficial board of strategy massing the different investigating processes upon con- verging results. Their moral influence will tend to transform the forces of social interpretation from unorganized raiders into an army of conquest. In other words, sociology cannot pass, any more than physical science or psychological science can pass. Each is now imbedded in the world's methods of thinking. Each may change its name. Each may go through innumerable trans- migrations of soul into the bodies of new problems ; each may be refined in the course of these migrations ; but each is an achieved power which, once gained, can never be lost.