Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/169

 THE SOCIOLOGISTS: POINT OF VIE\\' 155

to thousands of his neighbors worse than useless as a New Eng- lander as the "irrepressible conflict" approached. He was so broadly human that he was a tardy partisan. The things that he thought and said seemed to the majority mystical and imperti- nent. Men whose narrowness was their virtue denounced his breadth as vice. Yet some of these same men lived to acknowl- edge that, at the supreme moment, Emerson was in the con- flict with ten thousand disciples whom he had formed into large true men.

The sociologist who has exerted more influence than any other in France during the last thirty years got his influence by predicting just what befell France in the war with Prussia. He studied social conditions in France and pointed out the direction in which they afterward proved to be tending. 1 Ability to make similar forecasts is the end at which the sociologists aim. They believe it possible so to organize and improve methods of inquiry about society that great gain may be made in our ability not only to foresee but to foreordain. To further fix the sociologists' point of view, I pass then to some of their more general ideas about methods of studying society.

To illustrate the sociologists' view of the ways in which we must learn to study society, in order to get what we can discover into truthful shape, let us imagine that we are for the first time confronting the question, What are the inside facts of society ?

Let us suppose that this question had never been asked before. Suppose that we had meanwhile acquired all the ideas of logic, and of science, and of the laws of scientific evidence which we now possess. How would we go to work to discover the inside facts of society?

If we had no well-established sciences <>t human li: ences dealing with men in society, to embarrass us in marking out a method appropriate to our task, men of modern scientific temper, trained under the rules which modern science has tested by experience, would doubtless proceed somewhat in this way : They would begin by taking a fair, full, clear view of the whole

Jot-K. ..|. 801 . March 1897, "The I.e Pl.iv Method of Social Observat