Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/165

 THE SOCIOLOGISTS' POINT OF VIEW 151

tools, without provisions. He would not even then be utterly uncultured or absolutely unskilled. He would carry rudimentary civilized tastes and the beginnings of social tradition. Cut off from the body of that tradition, however, he would not come into his inheritance as an heir of the ages. He would have to begin where primitive men began, and live the fragmentary life that all men had to lead before life upon life had accumulated facilities and capacities for living. He would have to learn all the things about the resources of nature, their uses, the ways of extracting and transforming and applying them that have been discovered in the course of human experience. He would have to acquire all the arts and crafts and mysteries by which the world's workers have wrought over raw material for human use. Thrown back upon the necessity of doing all his living for him- self, he would need thousands of years to acquire the tastes, develop the wants, and learn the skill to provide for himself the food, clothes, tools and trinkets that the ordinary civilized man requires. In our actual brief term of life we have much life by being sharers of all past life.

There are still further reasons for the study of society. Sooner or later thoughtful people discover that society is a col- lection of problems ; people have to tackle these problems. Improvement of life means solution of these problems. In order to render any intelligent assistance in solving these prob- lems we must study society sufficiently to make the problems real to our own mind.

These social problems, as proposed by complainers, and agitators, and "reformers," and seers of every sort, prove upon inspection to bcjargcr or smaller parts of certain greater prob- lems like these : What arc we human beings actually living for? What arc we trying to bring about, on the whole, as the outcome of living? Are we making the best use of our resources to reach these ends that we have in view? What is the best that we might live for, if we took a little wiser look into the situation, and calculated the inedibilities of life a little more broadly and

>ly? We cannot dissolve this social partnership if we would.