Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/490

 470 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

I find it enough to live, without spinning lies to account for life." With due deference to the majority we must insist that the estimate lacks precision. The philosopher is the man who is not satisfied with knowing anything in itself. He wants to find out how each thing' fits together with other things. Here again all things are relative. Hamlet's grave- digger and Sam Weller and Maggie Tulliver are Bacons and Kants and Hegels on a small scale, yet it is only in a humorous sense that we call them "philosophers." A great many people are philosophizing above the heads of these types, yet without grasp of enough things to give their thoughts a rating among philosophers. They are finding the times out of joint in a thou- sand ways. Some of them are trying to mend things. They may be acting wisely or unwisely in their places. In either case there is just as much and just as little reason for calling them sociologists as there would be for calling the inventor of a voting machine, or a promoter of the Torrens system of registering land titles, or the captain of a precinct, a "political scientist." He may be, and he may not. The particular work that he is doing proves nothing. Then there are men who put still more things together in their thinking, and show the philosophic spirit in larger ranges. They deal with facts that go together in sciences. These may be sciences of things, on the one hand, like astronomy or geology, or they may be sciences of people, like history or economics. To deal with these sciences requires a relatively high degree of philosophic power, but men may and do cultivate these sciences as though the abstractions which each chiefly considers are suffi- cient unto themselves, and do not need to be adjusted to less interesting aspects of the whole from which they were abstracted. There have been historians enough, for instance, who were con- tent to find out just what occurred. They have taken such a narrow view of their work that learning just what occurred seemed to them more important than discovering whether it was worth learning. There have been economists enough who have added to knowledge of the rules which nations must follow in order to increase wealth, and have assumed that they have thereby taken account of all that it is worth while for nations to consider.