Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/166

 I 52 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

How may we make it closer, and better adapted to secure these better results ? All the questions about wealth, labor, monopo- lies, trusts, forms of government, administrative policies, class relationships ; all questions of justice and morality between man and man, are parts ami details and variations of the great prob-

nf knowing society as the real fact, the largest, most mean- ing reality that we touch in actual life.

One of the reasons why we have to put up with social dis- turbance in the place of social progress today, why we have such strifes of tongues and opinions instead of instruction fit to improve life, is another version of the answer to our question, vi/., men are so anxious to solve social problems that they have no time to study society. The consequence is that their solutions do not solve. Worse than this, their agitations create more problems. The shortest way to reach ability to solve social problems is not to try to solve them at all for a long time, but to learn how to state them. To most of those who share the fever- ishness of our day to extemporize social solutions this programme seems to demand waste of too much valuable time. On the contrary, the men who are intelligently following this programme, by studying partially understood factors in society instead of trying to cipher out social problems whose terms cannot yet be definitely expressed, are making haste slowly, to be sure, but they are making haste.

These propositions are so commonplace that serious difference about them might seem impossible among intelligent people. The fact is, however, that the people who are concerned about social questions are separated into the scientific and the unscien- tific class by divergence at this very outset. The men of scien- tific temper and the men of business methods maintain that realistic study of social facts simply as facts, without any inter- position of our opinions and feelings, is the only credible guarantee of the respectability of subsequent conclusions. Facts alone can be a reliable source of opinions. Men of the opposite type not only skip the work of getting evidence and sifting it ; they even deny that such unemotional examination of facts is possible, and