Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/495

 WHA T IS A SOCIOLOGIST f 475

understand. Letters frequently reach the editors of this JOURNAL voicing the same complaint. It must be admitted that there is a measure of justice in these rebukes, yet there is another side to the case which laymen do not appreciate, but investigators must not allow themselves to be confused about it. Scientific discussion is by no means a mere matter of rhetoric. It is not simply expressing something. It is often an essential part of the process of getting something to express. It is an attempt to formulate a real problem where the layman has no suspicion that a problem exists. It is hazarding a thesis to be tried against the attacks of competent critics. It is an hypothesis to be tested. It is a tentative generalization. Simply because it is a generalization, whether it proves valid or not, it is beyond the usual range of ordinary reflection. That is, the subject and the predicate extend beyond the horizon of everyday vision. No matter how precisely they are expressed, therefore, they do not present a clear image to minds not accustomed to that outlook. If the proposition were expressed so that it would mean more to the layman, the language might lose the very elements that contain its peculiar meaning for the specialist. Of course, it is an affront to omniscient democracy to intimate that every man is not as competent a specialist as any man upon such a familiar subject as human society. Of course, if the average man does not take in the full meaning of a sociological proposition, it is the fault of the sociologist who utters it. Nevertheless, it will be necessary for a good while to come that men who are actually advancing knowledge shall talk to each other a great deal in language that says little or nothing to the layman. On the one hand, the layman has no business to find fault with this, and, on the other hand, if he does, the specialist has no business to mind it. Whatever may have been their sins of abstruseness, American scholars have committed more and greater sins through overambition to impress the public. Premature plays for popularity are much more deplorable than mysterious technicality. In the end scientific tasks are per- formed sooner and better if scientists address themselves exclu- sively to their kind, till they convince each other that they