Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/201

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 187

The sense in which we urge that mastery over things is a phase of proper personality, and thus in so far an end in itself, may be illustrated by a sort of parallel familiar to scholars. Educated men pity people who have to put up with information without corresponding insight. The navigator or the accountant who mechanically applies his table of logarithms, without under- standing how a logarithm is derived or what essential relations it expresses ; the drug clerk who knows how to interpret the signs in the physician's prescription, but who has no idea why two substances may be compounded, while other two may not ; the voter who learns the program of his party, but is impotent to criticise or to decide whether the program is wise and just each of these, from the scholar's point of view, is pitiable. They have the form and some of the uses of knowledge with- out that wisdom which is the completion of knowledge. Real knowledge is personal insight into the relations partly expressed by the practical information. A generation that had forgotten its mathematics and its chemistry and its statesmanship, and had retained only rules and formulas and statutes, would be a generation intellectually dead. It would have the form of knowledge, but none of that spirit of divination which is the vitality of knowledge.

In a similar way a generation that multiplies material prod- ucts, and glorifies the controllers of them, while it exempts one order of men as completely as possible from personal mastery of things, and identifies another order of men as completely as possible with unthinking machine production of things, inevitably diminishes in both classes the proper exercise of possession, and thus the appropriate realization of manhood.

The perception which we are now emphasizing is that mas- tery of things is a function proper to complete personality. Speaking in terms of the appropriate product of this mastery, or wealth in the sense in which we have used the word, wealth is physical substance and attribute raised to a higher power by the reinforcement of thought. Wealth is man's first realization of independence among the world-forces. That lordship over things which directly creates wealth in the popular sense is more