Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/489

 WHA T IS A SOCIOLOGIST f

facts of society is a sociologist, any more than every tinker and blacksmith is a physicist, or every cook and soap-maker a chemist, or every gardener and stock-breeder a biologist. There is a sense in which each of these practical employments is a phase of the science to which it is most closely related. In that sense, and in the degree in which the workers enter the scientific ranks, the laborer might be called physicist, chemist, biologist, etc. If there is any propriety, whether much or little, in such loose application of terms, there is precisely the same propriety, in the same sense and in the same degree, in the case of ordinary social workers and the term "sociologist." A printer may incidentally be a statesman, but we do not for that reason call typesetting statesmanship. In the same way the organizer of a labor union may be a sociologist, but organizing labor unions is nevertheless not sociology. Whether a man is a sociologist or not depends on the extent to which he uses the " certain way " of studying social facts, to be more particularly described in a moment.

This is, of course, a matter of more and less. It is not a dis- tinction between things that are absolutely unlike. We cannot draw an arbitrary line, on the one side of which men are states- men, or scholars, or artists, and on the other side of which they are not. Every one of us is a small fraction of statesman and scholar and artist, even at our everyday work. The same thing might be illustrated in all the occupations of life. There is no way to guard the term "merchant," for instance, so that it will distinguish a rank or a class. The vendor of shoestrings or pea- nuts on the street corner is a merchant, so far as he goes, as truly as the directors of the East India Company. The boys who specu- late in "extra" editions of the newspapers are "financiers" in their way not less than Mr. Morgan in his larger operations. All differences of this sort between men are matters of degree. The gradation of the layman into the scientific man simply falls under a universal rule.

The sociologist is, further, a man who is studying the facts of society in the spirit of a philosopher. Doubtless the majority are with one of George Eliot's types in the sentiment: "A phi- losopher is the last sort of animal I should choose to resemble.