Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/491

 WHA T IS A SOCIOLOGIST f 47 l

There have been political scientists enough who have worked out principles of government, and have been content to explain political machinery as an end in itself, without disturbing them- selves to inquire what the ultimate ends are to which all govern- ment is merely a means. Thinkers of these types deal with some of the same facts that the sociologist studies, but they display so little of the philosophic spirit that they are properly only crafts- men. On the other hand there are historians and economists and political scientists who try to find out what the connections are between the facts which they particularly study and all the other facts which occur in human experience. These men are philoso- phers, and it is only an accidental division of labor, not an impor- tant difference in kind, that separates them from the sociologists. The name " sociologist" belongs, then, to all students of society who think of human life, past, present, and future, as some- how bound together ; and who try to understand any particular fragment of human life which they may study by making out its bearings upon and its being-borne-upon-by all the rest of human life. A great many people have the notion that sociology is merely a pretentious name for slumming. They suppose it is concerned at most with some of the least successful, or least desirable, elements in society. They take it to be absorbed in plans for improving the condition of wage-earners, or for deal- ing with paupers and criminals. This notion has been encour- aged by people in prominent academic positions who ought to have known better. There is just the same fraction of truth in it that there would be in the idea that chemistry is devoted to poi- sons and putrefactions and foul smells. Every human calling, from tilling the soil to writing epic poems or founding ethnic reli- gions, has for the sociologist an interest in exact ratio with the importance of the part which that particular calling plays in the whole drama of life. The sociologist is the man who tries to fill the place in our scientific age which the old-fashioned philosopher occupied in the ages of metaphysical speculation. If we remember that the older philosophers varied from Socratic commonplaceness to Platonic idealism, we shall not be surprised at the different sorts of sociologists to be mentioned below. The