Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/52

 38 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

tive value to the science of society of record and tradition. In general, the best evidence is that which is given most uncon- sciously; it needs less weighing and correction for bias and error. Records like the Chaldaean contract-tablets need practically no correction ; chronicles may need a great deal. Both, even if candid, are marked, to a certain degree, by a narrowness of the range of their interest. The intimate details of daily life are represented but partially, and often fragmentarily and inciden tally, in mortgages and bills of sale, and in documents recounting the victories and the magnificence of kings. The former may shed a deal of light upon the industrial organization, property, even marriage systems ; the latter upon military affairs, the royal prerogatives, etc. But they do not present a picture of a society as a whole.

Tradition, however, is quite another matter, especially if it is embodied in forms possessing some continuity. It becomes then a sort of ethnography, wherein are illustrated and empha- sized these aspects of life in society upon which the interest of mankind has always centered ; and in the examination of which human curiosity has, of late years, organized itself in a syste- matic, scientific form. A body of literature, being usually many-sided by the conditions of its persistence, and by reason of the same necessity full of "local coloring," approaches closer to universality in its evidence as to a society's life than mere record is likely to do, and for this quality a science which aims to study society as a whole can easily afford to sacrifice techni- cally historical information which runs the risk, besides, in early times, of being trivial and not to the point.

It cannot be denied, of course, that tradition may be very misleading. This is especially the case where there is an absence of the wholesome corrective of context. But, neglect- ing fragmentary tradition, it is true that in the epic almost every- thing is pure gold for the sociologist except the main theme or whatever that part of the production may be called where the author or authors, with an object in view and a point to prove, are led to give a less unconscious and unbiased evidence. But the patriotic, or religious, or dramatic motive, by the very