Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/176

 162 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

place and function ; and educationists of all schools practically agree that increasing effort should be made to impart to every sane adult of the population what we would here call the socio- logical habit of mind. Of this mental attitude is not a chief trait the power and habit of picturing any particular social phe- nomenon (say, a loaf of bread, or a band of musicians, a police- man, or a horse-race), not merely as an object of personal use or enjoyment, as something to be sought or avoided, but also as something to be seen and felt in a larger way as an element in that unfolding series of actions and reactions which we are learning to call social evolutions. Everyone is doubtless capable of acquiring in varying degrees of thoroughness a certain power of sociological interpretation, a certain capacity of observing the tendencies of facts and events, and judging of their significance by reference to sociological ideals.

But how to pass from sociological observation and interpre- tation to the practice of social conduct ? It is, at any rate, among the supreme problems of the sociologist to work out the con- ditions of normal evolution under which each type may develop to its highest perfection, yet also those by which the lower types tend to be replaced by or transformed into the higher; it may be regenerated into types higher still. To the moral ideal, so well expressed by Schiller, of a society in which the normal type is a beautiful soul, biology adds as material accompaniment the conception of a stock which breeds true to a norm of physi- cal health and beauty. These two ideals are sociologically inseparable, and to inquire what are the social conditions that make for such individual realization is the ceaseless quest of applied sociology. Toward such studies, then, philosopher and scientist, man of affairs and philanthropist, have long been con- tributing; is it not time that they increasingly unite?

VICTOR V. BRANFORD. LONDON.