Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/826

8 10 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY these sentiments qualitatively, and to be good judges of the stimuli that tend to rouse them. So of the sectarian sentiments. Everybody knows that there are materials for very determined conflict in most of the cities of the United States, if the inhabitants did not instinctively take account of the fact that they are not homogeneous theologically, or even religiously. We are in the main—not to mention minor differences—Jews and Catholics and Protestants and eclectics. Every candidate for public office, and every bidder for public approval of any sort, in our cities, or in the country at large, has to adjust his conduct to approximate qualitative knowledge of these religious differences. Not only that, but every citizen has to pay more or less conscious respect to the existence of these differences. The more general and public our relations are, the more do we need to make our qualitative knowledge of these factors in our environment precise and available.

The same is true of the centralizing and localizing sentiment in our political motives in the United States; of our sectional consciousness; of our attitude toward the possibilities suggested by the terms "expansion" and "anti-expansion;" of our individualistic and collectivistic tendencies in formulating industrial ideals. We cannot be intelligent actors in public life in any station unless we know the existence and the role of these and similar moral forces in our society. We must know them, not merely in these relatively complex and familiar forms, but in their relatively simple and elusive psychological elements. It is impossible for us to know these forces as the mechanical engineer knows the amount of power set free by use of a given quantity of fuel, or by the fall of a given volume of water from a given height. What we can know at best is the character and tendency of these forces, and certain facts of varying degrees of accuracy about their sources and their reciprocal ratios.

Now sociology, in its most general form, as well as in most of its more special forms of history, ethnology, economics, etc., is dealing with phases of human life which, at present at least, are knowable only qualitatively, and to a certain extent relatively. To know human relations in this way is by no means a