Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/171

 ORIGIN AND USE OF THE WORD "SOCIOLOGY" 157

his all-roundness and comprehensiveness of view, his insatiable but disciplined curiosity, his tendency to "think things whole." The sociologist will inevitably fall short at some stage of his work unless he, too, is possessed by the philosopher's " univer- sal homesickness" the unquenchable desire to feel at home in all the representative departments of thought and action. It is by the cultivation of this tendency that the specialist in any department of social science may hope to pass from the abstrac- tions of his special studies to an approximate unification of available sociological knowledge, and from this concrete unity may, and indeed must, proceed to consider its practical appli- cation to contemporary life. In other words, it is by combining philosophy and science (and these again alternating with practi- cal effort, though in that the sociologist passes beyond his own definitive sphere) that the student may enjoy the necessary discipline of specialism in science, and, transcending that by the aid of historical and philosophical studies, may rise into the sphere of pure and applied sociology.



But the great body of instructed people, who are neither specialists in science nor professed students of philosophy of what immediate interest to them are sociological studies ?

There is a set of questions which popular custom sanctions and even enforces as an appropriate social catechism. We ask about a given person (i) What is he ? (or, if a woman, What is her husband?) a form of question which implies a popular belief in the dominance of the economic factor, for the question is universally interpreted to mean, How does he get his living? (2) What ideas has he? What does he know? (3) What about his character ? (4) Is his health good ? Does he come of a good stock ? and so on.

The asking and the answering of these apparently simple questions imply the dissemination throughout the community of a certain accepted body of knowledge, thought, and sentiment about the classification of occupations and their grading in social repute; about social criteria of wealth production, acqui- sition, and consumption; about standards of physical develop-