Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/384

 370 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

whether his work remains purely scientific or is applied immedi- ately to conduct. His foresight does not go beyond the testing of his hypothesis. Given its success, he may restate his world from this standpoint and get the basis for further investigation that again always takes the form of a problem. The solution of this problem is found over again in the possibility of fitting his hypothetical proposition into the whole within which it arises. And he must recognize that this statement is only a working hypothesis at the best, i.e., he knows that further inves- tigation will show that the former statement of his world is only provisionally true, and must be false from the standpoint of a larger knowledge, as every partial truth is necessarily false over against the fuller knowledge which he will gain later. Even the axioms of Euclid are not true now in the sense of Euclid. In a word, our confidence in the results of science and the general application of intelligence to the control of the physical world is based, not upon a knowledge of the whole universe as it is, but upon a faith in its general rational character, that is perhaps best stated in the success of working hypotheses.

In social reform, or the application of intelligence to the control of social conditions, we must make a like assumption, and this assumption takes the form of belief in the essentially social character of human impulse and endeavor. We cannot make persons social by legislative enactment, but we can allow the essentially social nature of their actions to come to expression under conditions which favor this. What the form of this social organization will be depends upon conditions that lie neces- sarily beyond our ken. We assume that human society is gov- erned by laws that involve its solidarity, and we seek to find these out that they may be used. In the same way the natural scientist assumes that the world is as a whole governed by laws that involve the interaction of all its forces, and that he may find these laws out, and use them for the further organization of his world, so far as he is a part of it.

There is here, however, a distinction that is of considerable importance. In the physical world we regard ourselves as standing in some degree outside the forces at work, and thus