Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/413

 METHODOLOGY OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM 393

advertise the purpose of holding all judgments about partially known relations as provisional until all the available evidence is collected and weighed, and until the relations in question can be correlated with all the cooperating factors. This admission that we are at the beginning of accurate knowledge about society rebukes the self-esteem of men who have made no close investigation of any portion of social reality, but who wish to be heard as social oracles. It tends to set a just appraisal upon men who have worked out mi.nute fragments of knowledge and want these parts to be accepted as final for the whole. In other words, calm analysis of the processes involved in acquiring authentic and coherent knowledge of the essentials of human associa- tion exposes, on the one hand, popular ignorance jealous of implica- tions that knowledge is lacking, and, on the other hand, pedantry and sciolism posing as scholarship. Every person with an a /W(7/-/ theory or programme about society; every person who wants to divide up the facts of human experience into convenient little blocks of toy knowl- edge with which he may play science ; every person who wants to pretend that he-understands the laws of influences in society, resents the connotations of our method. It means that we know compara- tively little about society as yet, and that it will take long, hard, com- bined labor, by many searchers and organizers working within sight of each other, to get social facts into such shape that they will tell us much general truth.

The most energetic and contemptuous criticisms of the methodol- ogy we are developing come from men who want to preach social doctrines, and who instinctively know that doctrines of the degree of generality which they wish to promulgate have no present sanction but dogmatism. Hence they wish to be at liberty to dogmatize, and are jealous of methodology that exposes the poverty of evidence behind their dogmatizings. Every man who wants to pretend that we know more about society than we do, objects to the exhibit which our analy- sis makes of the considerations involved in knowledge of society.

On the other hand, the men who yield to the discipline of a genuinely scientific method frankly admit that we have as yet rela- tively little sociological knowledge which deserves to be dignified as "science." We have a vast range of unsolved problems, all visibly composing a comprehensive social and sociological problem. The perception that these problems exist, and that they demand solution, need not make Hamlets of the sociologists while solutions are in abeyance. On the contrary, clear perception of the intricacies and