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 856 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

laymen to sociology. I particularly dissent from the author's judg- ment that " Such a volume as is here offered ought to make more easy the introduction of this study into institutions where it is now omitted" (preface). My opposition is purely pedagogical. Aften ten years' experimentation with sociology as a subject for graduates and under- graduates, I am sure that it is folly and delusion to feed the latter on the kind of propaedeutics contained in this book. Better omit soci- ology from college courses altogether than insert it in this form. I speak with confidence, because I began by committing the very error which I am now pointing out, and I learned its futility by experience. The only sociological instruction which can be made useful enough to undergraduates to justify displacement of time-tested subjects is drill upon definite sections of sociological problems by teachers suf- ficiently sure of themselves to keep most of this methodology out of sight. 1 When the sociologists were locating the new territory, and at the same time trying to get it recognized by the colleges, they had nothing better to offer than this penumbral trigonometry. We can see now that it was a clear case of "silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I unto thee." Men are at present available who have had training which the pioneers lacked. They have organ- ized so much of this preliminary delimitation and procedure into their thinking that it is like the grammar of their mother tongue : they can observe it without discussing it, and they can gear it on to the work in hand. These men can introduce undergraduates to problems in soci- ology in such a way that some of the method may be taught incidentally, some will teach itself in the course of dealing with concrete material, and other parts of valid method will be demanded later by students after they have run against problems of method in a less arbitrary order. Methodology is psychologically, not logically, subject-matter for com- paratively late treatment. If it be exploited prematurely, the student gets the impression that sociology is merely a straining to create something out of nothing by formulating vacuity. To his mind it is very much like trying to perfect airships by plotting courses of navi- gation outside the earth's atmosphere.

The force of these observations will probably not be weakened by the fact that my own primary interest is in methodology, and, more than that, I find myself in hearty accord in the main with Dr. Stucken- berg's conceptions of the scope and method of sociology. I am,

1 Vide JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, May, 1897, p. 847.