Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/208

 194 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

modern men's thinking, and few people would care to waste their time in seeking props for a perception so direct and clear. A machine is at its best when part so plays into part that the total function of the machine is performed. A man is not at his best until he is able to think all that he does, and to follow all his conditions and actions with intelligent comprehension. Every man above the level of idiocy has to know something in order to act at all. No man can know all that the rest of men know. Between the extremes of nescience and omniscience there must be a typical condition of knowledge for the normal man. What is the indicated condition of the knowing process for the indi- vidual who is achieving himself in a healthy way, and for a society that is progressing?

If we think of knowledge primarily as a means to other ele- ments of living, our judgment about the working ratio between this element and the others is that knowledge is not in due proportion until it is sufficient to insure the standard of life appropriate to the individual in question ; or, what amounts to the same thing, until it is sufficient to insure the persistence of the social process at the point where the given individual functions. One is not a well-working "socius" unless one has the knowledge necessary to provide for self-conduct of one's own part of the social process. This is the conception, by the way, on which the American pub- lic school implicitly rests.

If, on the other hand, we think of knowledge as a portion of self-achievement which has implications of its own, apart from its bearings upon other phases of life, the ideal of knowledge is in a sense inverted. Knowledge for the sake of a process outside of itself calls for a focusing of all reality that can be made avail- able upon the particular process for which the knowing person is responsible. On the other hand, knowledge as an achievement by itself calls for a going out in thought as far as possible from the thinker's personal function, and a discovering of the content and meaning of as much as possible of the whole life-process, within which the thinker occupies a place. There is no antithesis at last, except a rhetorical one, between these two aspects of the knowing function, but this view of them affords a clue to