Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/541

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 52$

maximum return for a minimum effort, desirable in itself, or attainable if desirable?' The answer will, without question, depend upon the assumed purpose of social life. Economics alone is incompetent to define this purpose. It is the affair of a com- parative historical science like sociology, which works in con- junction with philosophy, that is, with the science of the high- est theoretical and practical questions of humanity. In his politics, that is, in his theoretical and at the same time prac- tical sociology, Aristotle claimed that happy life is the proper purpose of the state, which to him was identical with society. His notion of happy life was more fully defined in his Ethics. His whole politics and economics would have been different if his ethics had been different. So each modern system of eco- nomics takes form according to its assumed idea of the purpose of social life, that is, according to the sociology, and, in the final resort, the philosophy, from which it takes its departure. The isolation of economics has had as a consequence, so far as con- ceptions of history are concerned, only confusion."

Without resorting to further illustration from the philosophy of history, we may repeat that these snap-judgments about social laws, with all the dogmatism reinforced by them, have been so many rule-of-thumb attempts to do the thing which the sociolo- gists want to do more scientifically. They want to formulate precise problems. They want to bring valid methods of inquiry to bear upon the problems. They want to derive knowledge that will be profitable in all things civic.

At the same time it has to be confessed that, as was hinted above, most of the sociology up to date has repeated in its way the same methodological errors which the philosophy of history committed. Yet, although the sociologists have not been fore- armed individually as they might have been with lessons taught by the mistakes of the philosophers of history, sociology is gradu- ally assimilating those lessons. Moreover, sociology is profiting by the provincialisms of the pioneer sociologists. It is learning to find the element of truth in the clues upon which different men have attempted to build sociology. These premature schemes have accordingly served their purpose toward perfecting a