Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/174

 160 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

view the play on the stage, and to be able between the acts com- fortably to occupy himself in thinking about what he has seen. In other words, the interests of the pure scientist are, as a mat- ter of fact, aesthetic and theoretical. The ordinary man, to be sure, also wants to enjoy the play, to feel the pleasurable sensa- tions that accompany a stream of vivid impressions ; and inci- dentally it is to be observed that his enjoyment would be immeasurably increased if he were trained to see only a small fraction of what the scientist sees. But the chief concern of the ordinary man is naturally rather as actor than as spectator, and then with his own part in the play. His interests are partly contemplative, but mainly practical. He wants, above all, maxims of conduct, rules of action. For the latter he has for the most part to rely upon his own personal experience. The former customarily descend to him from previous generations of thinkers. Outside the material interests of life, the ordinary man has received little aid from the science of his own time or generation. The divorce of theory and practice in the higher relations of social life has been for more than a century a con- stantly expressed lament. The ordinary man has seen not a few of his long-cherished maxims overthrown by the scientist, and others challenged and made the subject of partisan strife. But from the verified body of contemporary knowledge there have as yet been derived no accepted principles out of which could be constructed a system of rules for directing the relations of domestic, social, and public life. In former times this inter- mediary service between thought and action has been performed by men under various designations that of priest, philosopher, moralist, theologian, humanist, statesman, educationist, etc. But life has grown immeasurably complex ; hence do not even these tend, like the scientist, to be absorbed, in various degrees, in interests of a relatively special kind ? Is it not the case that among each of these groups it is the men of broadest sympathies and widest knowledge who feel most keenly the desire for increased powers to enable them adequately to handle their allotted problems and tasks ? In such circumstances the common device of racial experience is a further subdivision of labor, as a