Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/537

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 521

They are less first-hand discoverers of ethnological fact, and more interpreters of the material that collectors and classifiers place at their disposal. The two types together realize a division of labor that is bound to make ethnology a powerful ally of the other search-sciences in revealing the social mystery.

We need not deny that blood tells, but we should not be prematurely certain that we can hear what it tells, or that we can distinguish the voice of the particular blood that speaks. What- ever truth is to be found out along this line is apparently farther from present demonstration than the truths about the transmis- sion of physical traits in general. It will doubtless be long before we shall be able to distinguish between proof in this field and fiction under a thin mask of illustration. Even if we were disposed to assume a priori that the whole truth lies in this direction, we should be phenomenally credulous to believe that the truth is already in sight sufficient to make a science of society to be remotely compared in precision with either of the physical sciences. The one prominent result thus far of attempts to fit the ethnological assumption to interpretation of the social mys- tery has been to impress judicial 'nvestigators with the non- correspondence between the hypothesis and the evidence chiefly relied on for proof. Instead of making toward the conclusion that blood corpuscles in one race so differ from the blood cor- puscles of another race that civilizations are contrasted with each other in consequence, the evidence makes for the conclusion that ideas weigh more than differences in animal tissue in deter- mining what the traits of associated life shall be. This is the reason why ethnology is finding its most promising develop- ments today in the line of ethnic or folk-psychology, which is only a cross-section of mass-psychology. Each is a chapter of social psychology in general.

The problems of the relation of the animal organism to the spiritual nature of man seem at present to be in progress toward solution, if anywhere, in the psychological laboratories. People who deal with human phenomena in bulk are not likely to solve these problems, whatever they call themselves. They can merely deal with aspects of human facts which leave these fundamental