Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/170

 156 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

laborers. The general aim underlying this division of labor is the directing of cosmic and human energies to the service of certain ideals of life. Each laborer works at his own job, what he conceives to be his specifically appointed task ; and so far well; but unless there is some common and correspondingly increasing understanding as to criteria, methods, and desired ends of work, there will be friction and waste of effort among the workers, and a struggle of ideals, in which the lower ones too often eliminate the higher. The study of these underlying unities criteria of the principles of knowledge, a theory of method, and a theory of ideals has hitherto lain for the most part with philosophy, under its branches of epistemology, logic and methodology, and teleology (doctrine of ends), or the like. From philosophy, then, the student of sociology must borrow the aptitudes and inclinations associated with these studies, leav- ing, of course, to their special cultivators the internal and techni- cal questions of each.

To philosophical studies also the sociologist must owe another, and perhaps the very first, of his qualities if we mean by philosophical studies the persistent endeavor to rethink the ele- mental thoughts that have occupied the great philosophers of history. The elemental questions about human personality, its origin and destiny, its relation to humanity and to the world, its degree of freedom and of determinism these elemental ques- tions touch the very bed-rock of sociology. And the sociologist claims it as differentiating his subject, both from metaphysical philosophy and from theology, that it belongs to him to restate these questions and the available answers from the point of view and in terms of contemporary science. But in claiming this province, the sociologist is far from denying legitimacy and justification, either to the dialectic of metaphysics or to the dogma of theology in a field where, beyond shifting limits, the rigid canons of scientific method do not reach.

It is, on the contrary, contended that contact with the living tradition of metaphysics, in the above sense, must be sought, if the student of sociology is to acquire in full measure that mental attitude which is the special characteristic of the philosopher