Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/486

 47 2 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

We have but to expand this method, based on regulative prin- ciples as wide as the moral world, as ancient as civilization, and we have a social technology a system of conscious and pur- poseful organization of persons in which every actual, natural social organization finds its true place, and all factors in harmony cooperate to realize an increasing aggregate and better propor- tions of the "health, wealth, beauty, knowledge, sociability, and Tightness" desires.

Indeed, every liberally educated citizen, alive to all the interests about him, constructs in his mind such a rational sys- tem in outline for the community in which he lives, and, in less definite form, for the commonwealth and the nation. So far as he acts reflectively, he directs his political, industrial, educa- tional, and ecclesiastical influence according to a more or less consistent body of regulative principles.

In one respect practical sociology is not at a disadvantage compared with theory. Explanation is relative to a given social system, as the "historical" school of economists has rightly urged and all acknowledge. 1

Regulative principles {Massregelri} have precisely the same limitations and scope. But in so far as the same system of conditions, forces, and organization obtains, to the same extent we can discover and present, not only explanatory principles, but also regulative principles. The extreme difficulty and com- plexity of the problem may well make us careful and painstak- ing, but never cynically hopeless.

And since many social forces are relatively continuous and permanent, and since there is increasing reciprocity between peoples, we may rationally hope to carry out on a world-scale the principles discovered in very restricted fields of investiga- tion. The chemist and biologist discover in the closet of a laboratory a principle which is published to the learned world, without fear that their conclusions will be put to shame by tests made, under the same conditions, on the other side of the Atlantic. True, we do not in social science deal with such uniform and

Socialwissenschaften, pp. 130 ff.
 * . e., K. BUCHER, Entstekung der Volkswirtschaft ; MENGER, Methode der