THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS Ugcnte THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY NEW TOBK CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON AND EDINBUBGH BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR General Sociology Adam Smith and Modern Sociology The Cameralists, the Pioneers of German Social Polity THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE By ALBION W. SMALL ^R^;^ 1^ OF THE UNIVERSITY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS ''^1 GENERAL ^a Copyright iqio By The University of Chicago All Rights Reserved Published November 1910 Composed and Printed By The University of Chicago Press Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. These lectures were heard by a company of graduate students drawn from all the social science departments. In variety of viewpoints a group so made up fairly represents the larger public to which appeal is now taken. The argu- ment is addressed to all thinkers who are mature enough, both mentally and morally, to recognize the complexity of social problems. The lectures are printed just as they were de- livered. If transitions from technicality to colloquialism are occasionally rather abrupt, they are merely cases of academic freedom in sacri- ficing elegance to force. A. W. S. The University of Chicago June IS, 1910 TABLE OF CONTENTS LECTURE PAGE I. The Ui^ty of Social Science . . . . i II. The Disunity of the Social Sciences . .32 III. The Sociological Reassertion of the Unity OF Social Science 55 IV. The Center of Orientation in Social Science 86 V. The Social Sciences as Terms in One For- mula 116 VI. The Descriptive Phase of Social Science . 149 VII. The Analytical Phase of Soclal Science . 179 VIII. The Evaluating Phase of Social Science . 214 IX. The Constructive Phase of Social Science 244 X. The Future of Social Science . . . .272 Index 301 LECTURE I THE UNITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE Several years ago it occurred to me that more ought to be done in the way of defining the things which the students of social science have in com- mon. I was impressed by items of evidence which came to me with monotonous rhythm, that stu- dents in our own social science departments were not turning the opportunities afforded by our rather minute division of labor to their best ad- vantage. Instead of using the means available for getting a wide survey of the field and of the methodology of social science in general, the typi- cal graduate student in social science is satisfied to confine himself rather closely within the bounds of two departments. The consequence is that he is unfortunately provincial about social sci- ence as a whole. It seemed to me that the work of our social science group would be much more intelligent if every candidate for the degree of Doctor of Phi- losophy in social science should survey the whole field of social science some time during his grad- uate years, from the standpoint of each grand division of social science, and under the guidance of a representative of each division. 2 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE As my own contribution to such opportunity, I announced a course of lectures, intended particu- larly for graduate students in social science, and aiming to exhibit the interconnections of problems in social science as they appear from the soci- ologists' viewpoint. The hearers whom I had in mind were those graduate students who did not elect courses in the Department of Soci- ology. It was, and still is, my hope that the other departments in our social science group may from time to time offer similar sur- veys from their particular standpoints. If even these meager reports of the schemes of labor em- ployed by the several departments should receive due attention from the graduate students of all the departments, the effect could not fail to be liberalizing. My announcement of a course of lectures once a week for a quarter stood several years in the group circular, but it appears to have been an offering for which there was no demand. As the preparation of the lectures would have cost neg- lect of other work, and as I could not be sure that the things left undone would be less impor- tant, I had no sufficient motive for carrying my theory into practice. This year, however, some of the graduate stu- dents took notice of my announcement, and called UNITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 3 on me to fulfil my promise. After having received assurance that there would be enough hearers to make the experiment respectable, I very gladly took up the work. In order to be able to say in fifty-five minutes enough fairly to outline the aspect of the subject treated in each lecture, I shall be obliged to write out my discussion in full, and to read it carefully, in preference to adopting the conference method. The latter manner lends it- self, in my case at any rate, to elaboration but not to compression. Although these lectures will be written, they will not be formal, and of course they can be only a sketchy treatment of the general subject of the series. They will be virtually very sum- mary and superficial talks about a theme which could be treated exhaustively only in a number of volumes. This does not mean that I shall present hasty thinking. What I shall say has been taking shape and changing shape in my mind over and over again since I began as a college student to puzzle over some of the rela- tions which I shall discuss. Only the expression of the thought will be extemporized from week to week in the fragments of time that my other work will allow for putting the argument on paper. The lectures will contain a good deal of repetition; repetition not merely of things which 4 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE are the stock ideas or phrases of all who have studied sociology in the restricted sense, but repetition from lecture to lecture of leading conceptions which must recur throughout the course. These conceptions indeed indicate the associations of ideas which, the sociologists main- tain, correspond with the correlations of reality. It is a large part of the sociologist's function in social science, as he sees it, to win for these ideas their due share of attention. He does not believe that it will always be necessary for sociologists or anyone else to harp on these ideas as insistently as the sociologists find it needful now. He hopes and even believes that many of the categories for whose meaning he is now obliged to contend will some time have passed into the fund of authoritative commonplaces which may be sched- uled as the "lapsed intelligence" of social science. He anticipates that they will some time have so passed into the habits of thought in social science that no one would think of disregarding or even of debating them, any more than we would debate whether the multiplication table is invariable. Meanwhile we are in that stage of scientific juvenility in which we are groping rather unsys- tematically after the axioms of human experi- ence. I have chosen ten points of departure at which to drive down stakes for preliminary sur- UNITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 5 veys in social science. In each of the lectures I shall have the wholeJeld-el-social science in view, and shall try to make it visible to my hear- ers. At the same time I shall try to make it self- evident that I am asking you to fix your eye on the particular stake to which the lecture is devoted ; and in each case I shall try to help you visualize the whole area of social science from the outlook of that particular stake. As intimated just now, the original announce- ment of the course spoke of it as intended princi- pally for graduate students who had not elected courses scheduled in our announcements as socio- logical. I have sketched these lectures in accord- ance with that plan. They will avoLd minute sociological technicalities. They will attempt to furnish an available introduction to sociological conceptions for graduate students in other divisions of social science who know sociology only as it is criticized or ignored in their chosen departments. Everything that I shall say will therefore be threadbare for students of sociology. Yet, while I shall try to put what I have to say in a shape that will carry its meaning to the his- torian or political scientist or economist or psy- chologist who may never have taken sociologists seriously, I hope the very fact that I have sharp- ened these particular stakes, and am using them 6 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE as landmarks, will help the sociologists to arrange their ideas in a more controllable way. Not merely in the present lecture on the unity of social science, but throughout the course on the more general subject, The Meaning of Social Science, I shall virtually elaborate the thought which I suggested in a paper entitled: 'The Sociological Stage in Social Science." It was published in the American Journal of Soci-' ology for March, 1910. To the man who is not a sociologist, the people who call themselves by that name seem to be more or less cheerful or cheerless cranks. The sociologist is supposed to have one or more wheels in his head that revolve in tracks totally outside the realm of real knowledge. Nobody quite under- stands how the sociologist smuggled himself into good society, and very few are ready to admit that there is good and sufficient reason for his remain- ing. But here he is; and he is almost as much puzzled to give a clear account of himself as the onlooker is to understand it when it is given. At all events, one thing seems generally to be' taken for granted, namely, that sociology and' sociolo gists a re something outside of and apart' from the orthodox and standard social sciences.' TheyTre a sort of alchemy and alchemist quack- UNITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 7 ery and quack in the field of human physics, or a species of faith-healing and faith-healers in the realm of social physiology. They are not angels that have fallen from the scientific heaven, because they were never in it. All this would be amusing if it were not so pitiful. This attitude toward sociology is really a self -indictment by everyone who maintains it. It is a betrayal of amateurishness and unsophistica- tion which would be fatal if it were not supported by such a big inert mass of like-mindedness. In such a numerous company it can persuade itself that its ignorance is superior wisdom. I want to liave it distinctly understood at the outset that I shall say not a word in this lecture that might not be said from their own point of view by historians, political scientists, economists, psychologists, or philosophers. There is nothing freaky about the things that I shall say because they happen to be said by a sociologist. In some form or other they are taken for granted, or im- plied, or even spoken out somewhat frequently by social scientists of all denominations. One of the commonplaces which I shall emphasize presently is that the common property of all the social sciences in these propositions upon which I am laying stress ought to sho^y that SQcioloja^'' is not 8 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE SO clearly an Ishmael in social science as is rather generally supposed. On the other hand, the same thing has its other side. The incredulous may feel them- selves confirmed in their incredulity by the resort of sociologists to assertion of commonplaces. The inference is : unless sociology has something more di stinc tive than that to say, it has no suf- ficient reason for existence. I shall return to this claim more than once in this and the following lectures. At present I state the general reply in this form: the first — not the only — ^peculiarity about the fact that these almost axiomatic things are said by the soci- ologists, and about the ways in which they are said, is that they are valued by the sociologists as worthy of sustained attention, not merely of rote utterance. The sociologists hold that we have not dealt with them in accordance with their importance when we have curtly nodded at them and passed on without further notice. There is a sense in which Professor Carver of Harvard is right, that "sociology is a science of left-over s." It is the same sense, however, in w^hich the operator of a brick kiln would be right if he said that the mason's trade is a knack of handling left-overs. From the brick kiln point of view, mortar and its manipulation in fasten- UNITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 9 ing bricks together might be called left-overs. Without these left-overs, however, the bricks would not stick together long enough to place the rafters for the roof of a one-story cabin. The left-over mortar and masonry are all that keep the bricks themselves from being left-outs. Without exaggeration or impertinence, I might adapt to sociology the biblical figure, "the stone which the builders refused, the same is become the head of the corner." That is, I do not hesitate to claim that the one central thing for which the sociological movement in social science is significant is necessary in order to give social science as a whole a thoroughly first-rate meaning. If I claimed nothing more for sociology, this would be enough to call for a new lining-up of all the social sciences, with their attention fixed on the neglected-elemerrtrin their situation. They all know the thing that they neglect. The soci- ologists are undertaking to make them know that they may no longer neglect it. What- ever else may be true or false about soci- ology, its reason for existence is something which does not shut it off nor set it apart from other social sciences. On the contrary, its essence is an assertion which must be the center of all sane social science, namely, that knowledge of human experience cannot at last he nianyj~m~lhe^-ep^e lO THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE in which it approaches reality it must be one knowledge. It may take a thousand or a million words to state what we know about a given occurrence, say the San Francisco earthquake; but after all the use of thousands or millions of words to con- vey our knowledge does not make the occurrence itself many. It merely exhibits the clumsiness of our machinery of knowledge, the contrast between our symbolism of representation and the objective occurrence, the approximateness of our intellectual reproduction of objective processes. The thing to be known is one connected whole. Complete knowledge of that whole would be a single co-ordinated achievement of the mind. Anything short of that is the mind's plodding along toward that completed achievement, or more or less distracted postponement of the achieve- ment. Sociology is really assuming the same pro- phetic role in social science which tradition credits to Moses in the training of his nation, when he sounded the keynote, "Hear, O Israel ! The Lord our God is one Lord." Or the role of the rally- ing cry of Islam, 'There is but one God and Mahomet is his prophet!" Of the role of all uni- theists, against those exaggerators of aspects of their conceptions of divinity who went so far as UNITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE II actually to set up a tritheism. Or the role of those modern psychologists who saved us from that mental philosophy which turned the human mind into a department store with devices for opening and closing impenetrable partitions between the divisions of intellect, sensibility, and will. Sociology is like each of these unifying alternatives in the one particular that it is pro- claiming the elementary truth of the unity of the social reality, and the consequent unity of all the divisions of science that may be invented as machineries for understanding the reality. It would not be true to say that the sociologists from the start have been conscious of their prophetic office, or that they have had an un- equivocal message, or that they have stuck con- sistently to a single text. Like nearly every other group of thinkers, the sociologists have more or less blindly felt their way toward their real func- tion. It would be unreasonable to demand that the men who began the process of getting a more adequate statement of the problems of human experience should have seen its end from the beginning. We may see very plainly now, how- ever, that underneath the impulses which were bringing sociology into being there were partial premonitions of the truth which is now central. The progenitors of sociology were strongly influ- 12 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE enced by the feeling, if not by the formula, that human experience is somehow an interlocking affair. They at least acted in the direction of the belief that attempts to know human experience will be relatively abortive until they resolve them- selves into an interlocking system of knowledge which shall fairly reflect the interlocking systems of activities to be known. By what right, then, do we demand that stu- dents of the social sciences shall rank themselves as students of one science? Simply by right of the discovery that the reality with which we are in contact when we try to analyze a phase of human experience is a reality which is i nterconne cted with all other phases of human experience. Pretension of knowledge of the~reality^-must consequently be ignorant and impudent if it is not a kind of knowledge that fairly reflects the blendings of the many unlike phases of activity in the reality itself. When I had written to this point, I found myself puzzled about the next step in the discus- sion. The sort of illustration that is most in point is utterly trite to everyone who has had even a slight acquaintance with sociological litera- ture. On that account I hesitate to repeat any- UNITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 13 thing so familiar. At the same time these necessary and obvious illustrations do not readily reveal their meaning, or at least their impor- tance, to anyone whose vision has not long been adjusted to the sociological point of view. I fear the brief use of the material which the time allows will not amount to much, but I will do my best to indicate the essence of the situation. Whatever our place of observation in the social sciences, historical perspective is a part of the birthright of our generation. All of us not merely admit, but we insist, that conditions are what they are, and events occur as they do, because a long chain of antecedent conditions and occurrences have set the stage and furnish the motives. All of us look upon anything that arrests our attention as a histo rical eff ect of his- toricaLcauses. Now let us see what this involves for our fundam ental co nceptions of social science. I will take for illustration the case with which I am most familiar. I distinctly remember when the whole civi- lized world — whatever the particular interests and sympathies that might have wished otherwise — felt an undercurrent of pity for those misguided boors on the other side of the Rhine, those quar- relsome, beer-guzzling barbarians, who wxre being 14 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE led by that swashbuckling Bismarck to certain annihilation by the refined, scientific, skilful, and altogether superior French. It was a case of matter against mind, of brawn against brain, of petty inexperienced provincialism against a cos- mopolitan imperial solidarity. The outcome could not be in doubt. How do we now explain the miscalculation of the civilized world ? Of course, I am referring to the general popular impressions, not to the contrary judgment of a better informed few. Why, we say the world did not know the real history of the two countries. Very well; so far so good. But what is the real history of the two countries ? Is it the things set down in the books written by men called his- torians, and that are on the shelves labeled history in our libraries? If so, then I assert not merely that the histories in existence in 1870 did not furnish a sufficient basis for a different judg- ment, but that those written since have not fully satisfied the requirements. What is the history of a country? To avoid confusion, and to distinguish between history in the sense of the literary reflex of what has objectively occurred and history in the sense of the objective occurrences themselves, I will use the term experience as a synonym for the latter UNITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 15 meaning. I will refer to Germany alone in the rest of the illustration. The experience through which the Germans ceased to be what they were in the sixteenth century, and became what they were in this decade of "Dreadnaughts," the experience which had not advertised itself very generally to the world in 1870, consisted very largely of occur- rences which either are not mentioned at all in the histories in the current sense, or if they are mentioned are not so connected up with the total process of the experience that their signifi- cance as functioning factors gets its necessary explanation and appraisal. It is superfluous for me to confess that it w^ould not be within my power to write a history of Germany. I have not even attempted ta write a complete account of the one thin strand of German experience which I am studying for a special purpose. In tracing this one strand, however, I have come upon evidence which I had no thought of looking for, tending to con- firm my main thesis about the oneness of the social sciences. If I had attempted to find more factors which entered into the experience, the list might doubtless be considerably enlarged, without resort to minute subdivision of the fac- tors. Naming merely the effective influences l6 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE Upon the Germans which I encountered while studying a single line of evolution in German theories of social science, I am able to present a schematic picture of the experience through which the Germans of 1510 became the Germans of 1 910. I have scheduled the objective circum- stances or occurrences in a column with odd num- bers, while the parallel column with even numbers contains titles of corresponding subjective factors. (See table.) The order in which the factors are listed is not intended to represent a hypothesis about their relative importance. To bring out the full meaning of this schedule, it should be changed into a diagram. From the title representing the original persons, lines should be drawn representing afferent and efferent chan- nels reciprocally connecting those persons with each of the twenty-five factors in the list. Simi- lar reciprocating currents should be represented between each of the twenty-five factors and every other. All of these currents should be repre- sented as converging in the lower title standing for the persons who are the temporary resultant of the experience. We must remember that each of these factors numbered up to twenty- four has had a continuity so unique that relays of persons might spend their lives upon either of them, and might find that the UNITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 17 THE GERMANS OF 1510 I. Their physical make-up. 3. Their physical environ- ment. 5. Their social antecedents. 7. Their political institu- tions. 9. Their established pri- vate law. II. Their fund of knowl- edge. 13. Their ecclesiastical in- stitutions. 15. Their economic institu- tions. 17. Their mores. 19. Their aesthetic self- expressions, including literature. 21. Their educational insti- tutions. 23. Their contacts with other civilizations. 2. Their standards of physical welfare. 4. Their technique of physical exploitation. 6. Their folklore. 8. Their political theories. 10. Their theories of pri- vate rights. 12. Their scientific metho- dologies. 14. Their theologies. 16. Their theories of in- dustry. 18. Their general philoso- phy. 20. Their theories of art. 22. Their theories of educa- tion. 24. Their theories of inter- national relations. 25. Incessant mutations of these factors, as they combined in the personality of individuals or groups representing countless combinations of interests. THE GERMANS OF 1910 \ l8 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE task of tracing the process of succession in each case was at last hopeless. We must remember too that the innumerable situations in the group indicated by the number twenty-five all need explanation by the help of the twenty- four fac- tors, and each situation in the innumerable group twenty-five might contain evidences that would modify previous impressions about the order of experience in one or all of the twenty-four fac- tors. We must remember further that this list of twenty- four factors is not the result of a thorough analysis of the experience as a whole. It is merely the result of examining a very obscure current in the experience, and it testifies only to the influences which were found at work in that area. What does the illustration bear on its face? To answer the question I assume agreement \ about the major premise that the main function \ of the social sciences is to make out the meaning of human experience. I know that there are all sorts of side-steppings to avoid this exacting principle. It condemns great masses of frivolity that thrive unrebuked under the name of one or other of the social sciences. I have even heard an eminent American historian make an assertion in public which I should be glad to be convinced that I had mis- UNITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 19 understood. He did not sufficiently explain him- self to remove the impression that he had said, "History need not even be true, if it is only artis- tic." Other social scientists actually turn social science into a lobbyist for special interests. Even these usually have a way of convincing them- selves that service of their special interest is the genuine way of making science the inter- preter of life. Assuming the major premise, then, that the main function of the social sciences is to make out the meaning of human experience — and even in the case of men who pervert the principle to thoroughly selfish uses, it has some value in ad hominem argument — what does our illustration bear on its face? What does it show us that the experience was, through which the Germany composed of several hundred camps of as many Wallensteins, eating the food of herds of bovine peasants, while they spent their time fighting each other for ownership of the peasants that produced the food — what was the experience through which this Germany became the Ger- many of our day, in some respects the most inti- mately interwoven co-operative commonwealth the world has ever seen? What was this ex- perience ? Well, on the face of the returns it was the 20 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE interplay of at least twenty- four principal factors, each single one so complicated in its sources, its evolution, its reactions under shifting conditions, that knowledge of one of these factors alone is likely to be at best very largely hypothetical, con- jectural, speculative, or at any rate fragmentary. Highly trained and experienced skill is needed to guard against the most glaring errors in ex- plaining the part that either of these factors plays at a given time — not to say from the begin- ning to the end — in its reactions with all the other factors. But this is not all. The part that one of these factors plays at a given moment is a function of the operation of all the other factors at the same time. If then it is so hard to get an all-sided knowl- edge of one of these factors alone, where shall the knowledge come from that will credibly put all the other factors in their working relations with a single one which a specialist may approxi- mately understand as an abstraction? Must it not come from an intelligent division of labor upon each of these factors — treated in full view of the perception that it is a factor, not a sepa- rate existence; and must not all these fragments of knowledge be assembled and fitted together — UNITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 21 somewhat as in the case of the parts of a puzzle picture ? The last analogy might perhaps be carried out at considerable length. That is, we may have a piece of knowledge about either of these factors. It may interest us very much. We may have a very high idea of its importance. So long as we hold it apart by itself there is very little to chal- lenge our estimate. But the moment we begin to fit it into the knowledge that other men have gained of these other factors, we are likely to find that our solitary estimate is very far from the truth. The item which we have rated as a first-rate factor may shrink to the dimensions of a twenty- fourth rate factor; on the other hand, the exact reverse might occur. In a word, therefore, the illustration carries on its face the implication that there must be team-work between the social sciences, if they are to advance from the rank of boys' play and con- stitute serious social science. A passage of human experience, like the one I have taken as an illustration, is as real as a chemical reaction. It is millions of times more complex than a chemical reaction. The task of the social sciences is primarily to find out just what occurred, and secondarily to find out the pro- cess of the occurrence, and the meaning and the 22 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE value of the occurrence; just as it is the task of chemistry to find out what occurs, and the pro- cess of the occurrence, and the meaning and value of the occurrence, when some iron filings and some hydrochloric acid are together in a test-tube. It is the task of the chemist to find in the reaction in the test-tube a fraction of universal truth. In a parallel sense, when we confront a passage of experience such as we have taken for illustration, our task is to discover what occurred in that experience zvhich has a significance for all human experience everywhere. Since the occurrences contained in a given experience are a composite of all the separate factors that co-operated, we degrade social sci- ence into a vaudeville program if we act as though we could work out historical stunts independent of economic stunts, psychological stunts detached from political stunts, etc. The human experience to be interpreted is a unity. The sciences that undertake the interpretation _ must begin by con- stituting themselves a unity. I have already indicated the sort of unity I mean, namely, not a unity of duplication, but a unity of team-work. I would not too directly anticipate the phase of the subject that I shall talk about in the next UNITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 23 lecture, viz. : "The Disunity of the Social Sci- ences." The general thesis will be that, strictly- speaking, we have no social science yet which deserves much respect. We have developed merely a number of techniques, historiography, statistics, psychological analyses, etc. We have not done very much, measured by the complexi- ties of the experience to be interpreted, in the way of organizing these techniques into an appa- ratus of discovery adequate to the tasks. To illustrate what a real process of discovery would involve, I will suppose that the members of the social science group in our own university, for example, decided to investigate the meaning of the process by which the old Germano-Roman imperialism first resolved itself into the four- hundred-fold particularism of Germany beginning with the Reformation, and the further process by which, after the breakdown of particularism in the Napoleonic era, decadent particularism trans- formed itself into the new imperialism of the modern empire. If our academic group were intelligently class-conscious, as the socialists would say, we should forget the departmental partitions that turn academic halls into dolls' houses. Twenty- four or more of the philosophers, and psychologists, and cultural and political and church historians, and lawyers, economists, soci- 24 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE ologists, etc., would become responsible for run- ning down the evidence, each for one of these twenty- four strands woven into the web of the experience, and each would try to learn from the others how his particular strand was woven with the other strands so as to make up the complete experience. We have to assume, of course, for the sake of the illustration, that the material necessary for carrying out such an enterprise would be accessible. The remainder of the instructors in the group might still devote themselves to instruc- tion of beginners in the use of the different scientific techniques, and to the selection of prom- ising candidates for more advanced training as investigators. The group of twenty-four or more men enlisted in this co-operative investigation would keep constantly in touch with one another, in order to trace each his strand better by making sure at every moment that its connections with the other strands were not mistaken. After five years or ten, the results would not be either of the academically disjointed sci- ences represented by individuals in the co-operat- ing group. The synthesized result would he an organic body of social science; a knowledge of a section of the experience of men in association. UNITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 25 I will sum up what I have said, with a dif- ferent order of statement and with slight varia- tions of form. In the first place, human experience is a connected whole. If we divide it into unrelated parts, between which we recognize no effective interdependence, we do violence to it just as we should if we arbitrarily dismembered objects of nature and constructed "sciences" of their scat- tered parts. Suppose we assumed that trees are not trees. Suppose we imagined that instead of trees, as trees, there is one independent exist- ence under ground, another from the surface of the soil to the first branches, another from the first branches to the topmost and outmost twigs. Suppose we proceeded to construct "sciences" of tree roots, and tree trunks, and tree branches in turn. The result would be three abortions. Just as we must organize our science of trees in another way; just as we must try to learn about trees as wholes; just as we must learn not merely the wholeness of individual trees, but the relationship of trees to the whole plant world, and the relationship of the whole plant world to the whole inorganic world, or else we deceive ourselves with the idea that we have a respect- able science of trees — so it is with social science. In the second place, I might have put the 26 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE argument in this form: Since human experience is a connected whole, just as the different func- tions of plant life and the different dependen- cies of those functions upon the conditions of surrounding inorganic life are a connected whole, so valid and responsible science of human expe- rience, like valid and responsible science of plant life, must be constructed by finding the actual working relations in this connected whole of human experience, and getting them charted in these vital connections. Valid social science can- not be a go-as-you-please race to seize something interesting in past or present human experience, and get that named as a winner in the speed trials. Valid social science cannot consist of catch-as-catch-can wrestling bouts with problems of human relations, as they happen to be pre- sented by conventionality or intellectual fashion, or by the opportunism of a passing stage of civi- lization. Social science will be merely myth- ology sicklied o'er with a rouge of realism, until it truly reflects the actual web of processes in human experience — ^just as there was no astron- omy, till the Indian and Greek and Norse and other mythologies ceased to substitute fantasies in men's minds for actual computation of the movements of the heavenly bodies. In the third place, I have taken as an illustra- UNITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 27 tion a sample portion of human experience — the development of the Germans from 1510 to 1910 — and I had in mind particularly the brief period from the culmination of Frederick the Greaf s ''benevolent despotism" to the beginnings of the struggles for constitutionalism after the battle of Waterloo. I said that without going very deep into the record I had found twenty- four factors at work in the experience of the Germans at that time. From my contacts with these fac- tors I conclude that each of them would fur- nish problems enough — genetic or analytic — to exhaust the resources of one species of in- vestigators. I have insisted that a respectably scientific report of this German development, as a typical treatment of all similar passages in human experience, would have to furnish an explana- tion of the part played by each of these twenty- four factors in terms of all the other factors with which each was in co-operation. I might have added, instead of merely hinting, that the pretentious histories which have been written about portions or all of this experience would not pass a very brilliant examination if tested by this standard. If we should make the requi- sitions upon them which mere speaking acquaint- ance with these leading factors would enforce, we should find that, considered as conclusive sci- 28 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE ence, in the sense in which physical scientists understand the term, there is not such a tremen- dous amount to say for these dignified histories, in distinction from Carlyle's Frederick the Great, or Louisa Miihlbach's novels. I might add that, if there were time, or if it were necessary, to support the generalization which I merely illustrate by this one case, I should go to the historians themselves, I should not ask you to take the word of a sociologist. I should not profess to be better able to judge what belongs to conclusive history than the historians themselves have long ago discovered. If you want to get an idea of what is stirring in the minds of historians today, which makes the sociologists say, "I told you so," which makes the sociologists say, "Haven't we predicted all along that sooner or later they will have to bring into the reckoning factors which they have treated as too petty to be bothered about?" — if you should want exhibits of these changed! or changing attitudes among the historians them- selves, read the address of Professor Robinson last year to the faculty and students of Colum- bia University, on the position of history in social science; read the presidential address of Professor Adams of Yale University at the 1908 meeting of the American Historical Association; read UNITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 29 the plans of Lamprecht's historical institute at Leipzig; look up Kurt Breysig's explanations of the methods he is introducing in his historical seminar at Berlin; or see it all summed up in Bernheim's latest rendering of the scope of his- tory. Here it is : Historical science is the science zvhich investigates and exhibits the temporally and spatially bounded facts of the evolution of men in their singular as well as in their collective activities as social beings, in the correlation of psychophysical causation} There you have it. The fact that Bernheim claims the whole for historical science does not feaze me in the least. What it will be called when we get it is the slightest of my troubles. The main point is that this most prominent his- torical methodologist in the world sees the task of all social science as historical science, but he sees it just as I am urging that every sane mind must see it, when we really get sane, as a unity of psychophysical interconnections. Call it history or what you will, the gist of ir is that it is unity^ and our lucubrations about the meaning of life are only more or less respect- able philanderings until they are organized into a scientific unity which veraciously reflects the objective unity. ^Bernheim, Historische Methode (ed. of 1908), 9. so THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE Once more I have put emphasis on the fact — which the last point has also illustrated — that although I am speaking from the standpoint of the sociologists, I am not professing to say things which are peculiar to the sociologists, or known only by the sociologists. The precise contrary is the case, so far as I have gone. I shall say things later which men in other parts of social science deny. All that I have said, and all that I shall say in the second lecture, has been said over and over again by men who spoke from the standpoint of each of the other departments of social science. The chief difference between them and me is that they think these things are so true that they will take care of themselves, even if everybody neglects them, while I think they are so true that they deserve to be lined out to all students of social science till they are in as common use as the alphabet. Finally, to avoid possible misapprehension of my argument, I must restate the conclusion which I draw from the necessary unity of social sci- ence. I am by no means contending that soci- ology is identical with that unified social science. All I assert is that the sociologists have some- thing to say which is bound to be one of the factors in organizing that unified social science. I do not know, and I do not much care, whether UNITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 31 anything or anybody will answer to the name sociology or sociologist a hundred years from now. For all I know, the same sort of change may take place which relieved the term "rhetoric" of most of the meaning that it once had. The term ''rhetoric" once covered all that was known or supposed to be knowable about human rela- tions. A like change may send all our present labels in the social sciences to the glossaries of archaic terms. This matter of names is too triv- ial for grown men. I am not even concerned to claim that sociology will have a separate desig- nation or a separate existence a hundred years from now. It may be wholly absorbed and dis- tributed among the different parts of the science which by . that time may be unified around the discovered center of gravity of human experi- ence. However that may be, this is the gist of the whole matter : So long as you are likely to live you will he blind leaders of the blind in social science unless you have learned to give a fair hearing to the things which the psycholo- gists and the sociologists are bringing out into prominence. LECTURE II THE DISUNITY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES The stake that I have to drive down now is this : Between the so-called social sciences today there is no team-work worthy of the name of science. Now, do not understand me to claim that sociologists are less guilty than other people of the faults that lie behind this condition. We are all human together, and if the actual transgres- sions which may be charged up to the sociolo- gists under this head are fewer in number than those of the other sciences, it is because the soci- ologists are fewer and have been a shorter time in the world. Even at that, I can assemble from my own personal knowledge enough cases among the sociologists of failure to co-operate w^ith one another to offset anything of a similar sort which I might illustrate from other branches of social science. Living in a glass house, therefore, I am shy of throwing stones. Besides, I am not engaged in a holier-than-thou propaganda. I am pointing out a w^orldwide trait of our pre-scien- tific period. In our social sciences the world 32 DISUNITY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES S3 over, we have all the pretensions of science but only the beggarly elements of its processes. When I have said things like this where they led to a friendly fight with men of other stand- points, they have always come back at me with some variation of the reply, "Oh, you are behind the times! You are thinking of five or ten years ago! We have changed all that! You simply have not kept up with the procession! You are talking about men of straw! Wake up and see things as they are!" Well, let us look at things as they are, but do not make the mistake of charging me with saying that we are not making progress all along the line in the social sciences. While I could not speak as an expert, of course, I have enough layman's knowledge of what is going on in a score of major and minor social sciences so that I would not ask an easier task than that of showing that splendid progress has been achieved in the last decade in every one of them. By comparison with past attainments I can eulogize each of the social sciences as enthusiastically as anybody. I am comparing what we are now doing in the social sciences with the sort of cam- paigning which our present insight into human relations makes it our duty to plan. I am saying that in spite of all we have accomplished, we are 34 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE doing comparatively nothing in the way of con- centrated team-work between the social sciences in organized investigation. No ! Whether progress has been made in the special divisions of social science is not the point. Whether progress costs poverty in the industrial world or not, there is progress in certain aspects of science which amounts temporarily to increas- ing poverty of spirit. One of the initial conse- quences of the division of labor in the sciences is precisely parallel, in its effect on the laborer, with the consequences of the division of labor in manufacture, which economists have observed almost ever since there has been division of labor. In the scientific case, the consequences are in one respect relatively worse. In science, we can have no manager to correlate the work of the specialists. The consequence is, therefore, nar- rowing both for the w^orker and for his output. Specialization in the sciences means a subsequent pre-scientific period of provincialized science. It is that stage through which the social sciences are passing today. We need not go back into ancient history to show this. I leave all that sort of evidence out of the account entirely at present, and I ask you to look at the case from an entirely different angle. DISUNITY OFTHE SOCIAL SCIENCES 35 After I had been trying to teach history and economics for seven years in a country college, I spent my first Sabbatical year at Johns Hopkins University. The organization of graduate work there at that time arranged all the students in the social sciences in one group of courses. Some of the courses were two hours, others three hours a week. All but a few were given in a dingy old garret called the seminar room. There was a long table at which perhaps thirty of us had our appointed places, and from nine until twelve, five mornings in the week, all of this thirty heard the same lectures and took part in the same discus- sion. First a historian would have us, then an economist, then a political scientist, or a soci- ologist, or a lawyer. When a specialist in either of these fields, or in some division of practical social affairs, came from Washington, or Philadel- phia, or New York, to talk to the seminar, faculty and students pooled their critical equipments, and in the interest of an all-around view of the subject attempted to test every man's theory from all the standpoints represented in the group. Pro- fessor Bloomfield came from the philological side to represent ethnology, and he did it in a way to put everybody on his guard about historical conclusions that did not reckon fully with the racial factor. Professor Gilder sleeve, from the S6 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE Greek department, was a vigilant censor over any prematurities about ancient history. The one conspicuous lack was the absence of a masterful psychologist. Professor G. Stanley Hall had just gone to Clark, and his place had not been filled. The beauty of the situation was that men who looked at human experience from a dozen differ- ent angles, and had as many distinct theories of the combination of methods by which the inter- pretation of human experience should be under- taken, each had a chance at us. We were a sort of jury in an academic equity case. We had to make up our minds about the ratio of value in the different claims, as presented to us by the claimants themselves — not by prejudiced third parties. Now I should like to know what you think of the comparative chances of getting an all- sided view of the unity and comprehensiveness of social science in an environment on that model, as contrasted with the system of pretty nearly water-tight compartments into which every other American university, so far as I can learn, has been tending to divide the social sciences. For various reasons, the picture that I have drawn of Johns Hopkins University twenty years ago would be less accurate as a description of the larger part of the intervening period. DISUNITY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 37 Assuming men of equal abilities, would you go for the most intelligent introduction to social science to a group of scholars that divided itself up into a series of non-communicating subgroups, in which a breeding-in-and-in process was culti- vated, where each subgroup practiced its own critical technique from its particularistic view- point, with precautions against contagion from groups occupying a different ground? Would you expect, under these latter circumstances, to get a balanced conception of the most compli- cated relations that our minds encounter; or would you choose to go to a group where there was a continual comparison of one viewpoint with another, and the constant co-operation of conflict to decide in a free forum how much of this view, and how much of that, and how much of the other could maintain itself as a legiti- mate way of entrance into the unity of the com- mon subject-matter? To ask the question is to answer it. There can be no serious difference of opinion among intelligent men about the two alternatives. In the resolute clash of all possible views, there is infinitely more prospect of establishing a perspec- tive fairly representing reality, than in taking refuge in one or two protected conning towers. 38 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE each with an aperture opening only in one direction. But the comment is made : "The sort of thing described at Johns Hopkins University is more fit for undergraduates than for graduates. Such a program is necessarily superficial. What it gains in extension it lose*s in intention. Speciali- zation cannot amount to anything if carried on in that way." I freely admit that there is force in the objec- tion, though I cannot believe it is conclusive. I freely admit, too, that there are other objec- tions to the Johns Hopkins plan, one of which is that it was unable fully to retain its dis- tinctive spirit; and I therefore hasten to explain that I am not advocating a plan but that I am merely using this particular plan, of which I have such grateful memories, to illustrate a prin- ciple. And the principle is this : Specialized sci- ence j whether physical or social, inevitably passes into a stage of uncorrelated scientific piece-work. In this stage of dismemberment, science is as inconclusive through its lack of coherence as it was in an earlier period from its superficiality. That is, it then had breadth without depth, it now has depth without breadth. Let me vary the statement in this way : What would you think of the state of engineering sci- DISUNITY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 39 ence that would go about the problem of a water- way between the two oceans in this fashion : By- some sort of gravitation which we may take for granted, a certain isthmus becomes, by common consent, the field of operations. Then groups of people who own steam shovels go down and look over the ground, and decide where they can work their specialty with the most profit. At the same time, a group of people who control blasting processes make their examination, and pick out the spots where their particular tech- nique can find the most to do. Meanwhile, men who own pumping machines select spots where they can find employment, and other men whose business is to construct masonry pick out places for building locks and dams, etc. All these people together flatter themselves that the sum total of this unorganized labor will turn out to be a Panama Canal! This is exaggerated caricature, of course. Engineers know better than that, and social sci- entists are not quite as independent of one another as the comparison would imply ; but seri- ously, our co-operation is indirect more than it is direct; it is accidental rather than systematic; it is after the event more than introductory to it. It is in the nature of picking up stray connections with work in other departments, instead of map- 40 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE ping out co-operative work to be carried on according to a concerted plan. Will anybody tell me that I am talking about conditions which were, and which are not any longer? If that is so, name a single case in the wide, wide world, of a concerted inquiry into human experience in any large range, according to a plan matured by conference between repre- sentatives of the cardinal divisions of social sci- ence, and by the organization of their respective methods. No! We are not yet scientific enough to do things in that way. There may be solitary in- stances of which I have never heard. If they existed they would simply prove the rule. Social science that would be relatively conclusive would be an account of the experience of men in their evolutionary process of finding themselves — the different factors and phases of this evolutionary process being exhibited in accordance with their actual functional values at different stages of the experience, not in accordance with schematic cate- gories which bound the conventional worlds of the separate sciences. For the sake of illustration, let us suppose that the cardinal factors in a given situation may be reduced to the economic, the legal, the psychological, and the ethical, each considered DISUNITY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 41 both analytically and synthetically. Have you ever heard of a single instance in which repre- sentatives of both phases of these four sample divisions of social science have actually planned and operated a large investigation into the con- crete phenomena and the relative influence of these four factors in a specific case? I have not; and because I have not, I make my assertion of today, which I hardly think any- one from any department of social science will deny : that we have no team-work worthy of the name of science between the different species of scholars that are exploring the social field. We have nothing that compares respectably with the work of the naval or war colleges upon their types of problems. They assemble officers from each branch of the service to combine their efforts in finding out how all the resources of all the branches of the service can be brought to bear in delivering or repelling a given attack. What do we do in the social sciences ? We retire into the segregation of our respective depart- ments. From the viewpoint of our interest in one group of factors in the social process, we either cancel the other factors from considera- tion, or we assign them our own ratings, and then proceed to interpret the real experiences in terms of our specialty. 42 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE Are these vague generalities? Then I will make them particular. I will state them in terms of our own situation. Details vary in the dif- ferent universities, but in the main matter I have no reason to think that we are better or worse than the others; because, as I hinted, I look upon the case of Johns Hopkins twenty- years ago as only a temporary exception. At least a dozen distinct methodological stand- points with reference to the interpretation of human experience are represented in our facul- ties, including the Divinity and Law schools. We are now in the eighteenth year of the life of the University. During that period, we have spent an aggregate of thousands of hours of the time of the faculty deciding whether one or two units more or less of Latin are necessary unto salvation; but there has been not a single hour of consultation between the men representing all these viewpoints in social science to see whether we can more effectively supplement and balance one another in our inquiries into human ex- perience. We no longer believe in such a thing as a cure-all either for public or private .ills ; but the salutary workings of publicity have made men rate it as nearer than anything else available to the rank of a specific for public wrongs. I may DISUNITY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 43 reduce my claims to the proposition that our devices for publicity in the social sciences are far behind the demand. Probably it would be hard to find an investi- gator of repute in any social science who intentionally belittles any real factor in human experience. Everybody today intends to give full weight to every factor that enters into every problem which he investigates ; but unfortunately no human mind is built on an omniscient scale. Our mental limitations make each of us, at best, an involuntary partisan after we have reached a certain outlook. It is impossible for us to see a given body of facts in the same perspective as another man who looks at them from an equally tenable standpoint at a different angle; and neither of us may be able to understand how the third man, observing from a still different angle of vision, can see the affair as he does. Since this is the case, the kind of problem which seri- ous investigation of human conditions confronts today is too big for the abstract departmental type of procedure. Yet our present academic process of accom- modating the different ex parte representations is, for the men who represent these different stand- points to get each other's views more often indi- rectly than directly; then, in the presence of stu- 44 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE dents who have not had opportunities fully to hear representatives of the other viewpoints, each of these partisans renders his opinion and returns an estimate of the proportional value of the other people's views and his own. Suppose it were a case in court. Suppose your individual interests were concerned. Sup- pose you had a sharp difference of judgment about the equities of the case with the most upright man of your acquaintance. Would you think it the most effective and just sort of pub- licity for your opponent to appear in court both personally and by counsel, while your side of the case was presented to the court only in the version of your opponent and his counsel? Not long ago a man took his Doctor's degree in history in a university that I might name. A student in another department was talking his course over with him and said : "Why, you have not had any ethnology !" "Oh, yes, I have," con- fidently answered the newly fledged Doctor. "I got that all right. Professor So-and-so gave us three lectures on ethnology at the beginning of his history course the first year." That young Doctor was about as well qualified to pass judgment upon the balance of forces throughout civilization as he would be to correlate science and religion, if DISUNITY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 45 he thought he could get all the science he needed to know by reading the first chapter of Genesis. I presume that if all the economists in the world could be polled on the question which living economist has most enriched their science, a decisive plurality would name Schmoller. Thirty- six years ago Schmoller uttered the defiant eco- nomic heresy : ''The entire economic demand is nothing hut a fragment of the concrete moral history of a given time and of a given people." Meanwhile nobody can accuse Schmoller of forgetting his own proposition. In a way, it is between the lines of everything he has since writ- ten. But how much more useful this axiom would have become to the world, how much more cir- cumstantial our knowledge of its implications, how much greater influence it would have exerted upon academic science, and upon the private and public life of civilization, if competent students of comparative law, of comparative morals, of comparative politics, and of comparative eco- nomics could have co-operated in testing this theorem, and could have put their results in evi- dence over against the various materialistic inter- pretations of history. Suppose the world wanted an answer to the question, on which President Jordan may or may not have committed himself recently, whether 46 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE France of today is a decadent nation. Suppose it became urgent to know whether France under the RepubHc is progressing or retrogressing, com- pared with France under Napoleon III. Have we any organization competent to institute an adequate investigation of such a subject? What is progress or retrogression in a nation? What is decadence or development? Who knows, and who has the means of deciding? Does decadence consist in a decreasing birth-rate, or may a decreasing birth-rate be a sign of progress? Is fecundity a criterion, or merely a consideration? Does progress consist in an increased per capita production of wealth, or in a favorable balance of trade; or may these conditions be merely the hectic flush of that greater white plague under which "wealth accumulates and men decay" ? Is it progress or regress in a given case to alienate church and state? Can we measure progress or regress by constitutions and laws, or must we judge constitutions and laws by the types of people that they tend to cultivate, and by the sorts of character that they bring into posi- tions of power? Has it dawned on us that national decadence or progress is a balance sheet which no accountant is yet competent to com- pute? Do we realize that we have no scientific criterion as to whether the business of living to- DISUNITY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 47 gether in a nation is prosperous or non-prosper- ous ? Not to analyze the problem below its large elements, merely to decide on the main factors of the composite standard by which progress or regress must be measured, would require some sort of tentative merging of partial standards, and ascertaining of the normal ratio between the ele- ments of life which are the immediate scientific interest of biologists, of economists, of jurists, of psychologists, and of moralists. Has anyone heard of a serious attempt at scientific co-opera- tion which might arrive at a tentative formula for the proportion in which these factors might enter into a criterion of decline or progress? Or let us suppose a related problem on the constructive rather than on the evaluative side of social science. As one of my friends in London recently expressed it : *'Some of our leading social theorists are trying to conjugate biology in the imperative mood." Under the spur of Sir Francis Galton, the men referred to are deciding that "eugenics" must become a national quest and a national policy. They see that it is absurd to apply science in raising corn and breeding sheep while we trust to luck in its most reckless form in producing men. Suppose now that one of the civilized nations reached the conclusion that the problem of secur- 48 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE ing good heredity for future citizens is worthy of scientific attention. Waiving all questions about possible ways and means of artificial human selec- tion, we have not even the beginnings of respon- sible scientific co-operation to determine the type of human being to be selected, supposing we had the means. How shall we decide upon the nor- mal citizen standard ? What shall be the formula of the ingredients to be mixed in the well-bred man of the future? What will his anthropo- metric picture look like? What crossings of races will he represent? To what extent will he be the product of a legal incubating system and to what extent a spontaneous growth ? How will he be geared into the vocational life of society? What will be his response to the legal and moral tradition that cements his society? How shall we find out? Can the anthropologist tell us, or the ethnologist, or the culture-historian, or the economist, or the psychologist, or the moralist, or the apostles of either of the "cultures" in the special sense? Each of these can contribute some facts and inferences that must enter into the specifications. Each can furnish some more or less amateurish calculations of genetic cause and effect in the particular sequence of development to which he has given attention; but for purposes of scientific precision we have not even the pre- DISUNITY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 49 liminaries for the kind of co-operation that can present a decently authorized introductory de- scription of the human type to be taken as best adapted to the conditions ahead in the course of moral evolution. Perhaps it will appear that the last two illustrations are so remote from the practical that they are not convincing. Very well ; I will state the case, without trying to elaborate it, in terms of a problem which is sufficiently near at hand. From the day of prohibitory tariffs in the Greek states to Joseph Chamberlain and Senator Aldrich, there have been countless variations of theory and practice in the matter of commerce with foreigners. Nobody is satisfied with our present American tariff, not even those who get the most out of it, because they want to get more. Our utmost hopes of a better tariff some time in the future are pinned to an embryo tariff commission. Suppose we had a real commission. Who is competent to instruct the commission how its in- vestigations should be planned? The question really presented by a tariff policy is not a question of finance, not a question of politics, not a question of economics; it is a question of civilization in all its length and breadth and depth and height. A tariff is one of 50 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE those devices which directly affects certain visible interests, which indirectly promotes or retards the whole human process. The total resources of a co-operative science of society would be able to furnish at best only guidance in experimentation upon the effects of different sorts of tariffs or no tariff upon the entire process of life. Mean- while decent scientific procedure with reference to the tariff problem would call into requisition not merely a commission to assemble details but an advisory council, made up of scientific repre- sentatives of all the great life interests, both immediate and academic; and the task of this council would be to shape up each successive phase of the tariff problem, so that it would pay proportional respect to the physical, and eco- nomic, and legal, and moral, and intellectual, and cultural factors involved. Any tariff policy whatever sets in motion influences which affect for better or for worse the whole big task of humanity. There is no co-operation of social scientists thus far which in any respectable fashion recognizes the complexi- ties of the civilizing task which enlightened society must undertake. If time allowed, I should be glad to show the same thing with respect to the problem of taxa- tion. DISUNITY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 51 The degree of goodness or badness in a sys- tem of taxation is a large factor in the ability of every human being to make the most of his life. While broader consideration has been given in some countries than in others to problems of taxation, and while the technique of taxation has been worked out very elaborately from certain points of view, the confusion and the injustice of the systems of taxation actually in use, and espe- cially in this country, are a challenge which the social sciences as a whole have never organized themselves to accept. I repeat then that the abstractions which we call social sciences have carried on their piece- work in such a w^ay that each of them has to its credit splendid achievements, when we compare these results with the mental acquisitions of earlier men. I am comparing our scientific situa- tion, however, not with the past, but with the demands of our present complex life. Measured by the requisitions upon present scholarship, the social sciences are today merely preparing pre- digested mental food for adolescents instead of developing all the resources of fully grown men for co-operative research. Partly as a commentary on the criticism that I am dealing with bogies which were put out of business long ago, I conclude with a passage 52 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE from the current number of Schmoller's Jahr- buch (L Heft, 1910) which I suppose I may be permitted to regard as fairly up to date. In that journal, Dr. Otto Neurath of Vienna has a long critical review of Wundt's recent volume. Die Logik der Geisteswissenschaften. Bear in mind that the reviewer is not in collusion with me. I have not bribed him to testify in my favor. He wrote from a standpoint quite different from mine ; but it is an interesting coincidence that an entirely unsolicited message of agreement should come to hand from a distant source while I was writing this lecture. This is the closing passage of the review : The future of scientific investigation, not merely in the realm of the social sciences, but of all the sciences, will lead in an ascending degree to the increasing recog- nition of the coherence of all scientific thought. The separation into distinct disciplines will no longer have, as its last result, the isolation of the investigators, but a more general, more comprehensive investigation will arrive at the principles which are to be held in common, and thus will arouse the consciousness that science is a unity. The individual will then be able easily to take a general bird's-eye view of the total system of the sciences, while today he confronts a chaos. What is common to all the sciences will lend itself to distinct formulation, and as a consequence, an organization of scientific labor will be possible. We have today come to the pass that there is an DISUNITY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 53 overgrowth of specialties in many a scientific territory, while no one surveys the whole territory. We call that division of labor. We should call it splitteration of labor, for we properly speak of division of labor only when a whole is accomplished through the co-operation of many. How few today see the whole of one science or even of one department! And there are many who find in this the glory of scientific labor. All special investigation gets its sense and its justification in being the investigation of a part which is to be put presently into its place in a knowledge of a whole. In order to bring about these combinations, some such co-operation must take place as Kant proposed, but probably not in quite the same form which he had in mind. It would be above all desirable if co-operative research by a large number of scholars could be carried on under unified leadership. A collection of special researches does not constitute a whole. That result can be attained only by the concerted labor of many scholars concentrating their methods upon a common problem. A series of special works, like Helmolt's Weltgeschichte, oder die Kultur der Gegenwart, is supposed to afford the layman a composite picture.^ How is that possible, when the pro- jectors at the same time assert that neither of the col- laborators is able to produce a picture of the totality? In this case again, the result is that no one surveys the whole, and we merely observe how differently the various authors often treat the same thing, that there is often no continuation by a later writer where an earlier one had made a beginning — in short that the binding threads are ^ Neurath might have added that Lord Acton's Cam- bridge History is in some respects a still better illustration of the point he is about to make. 54 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE lacking. Along with the special treatises there should appear in greater number than* has lately been the case surveys by great investigators. Today we are hindering rather than promoting such work. How much would be gained if commentaries were now written upon com- prehensive works, as was the general custom in the six- teenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. We have, for example, such commentaries on Adam Smith. If this custom were systematically developed, it would be at least possible that a special investigator might rein- force and fill out the work of the general surveyor, and in such work as that there would be genuine division of labor. Much is also to be anticipated from the fact that individual investigators, crossing the limits of their par- ticular territory, seek the means of combination in which others will join them. Still further, the common work is promoted by such men as Jevons, Pierson, and Enriques, who examine the general foundations of science. This whole movement will rescue us from the scatteration of labor, and will lead to a genuine correlation of labor. Only through genuine combination of scientific effort can we arrive at a real participation in the great achieve- ments of the human mind, and a just conception of the world as a whole. LECTURE III THE SOCIOLOGICAL REASSERTION OF THE UNITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE In the first lecture I tried to make the fact clear that a network of causes and effects weaves the life of men through the ages and around the world into a connected whole. That is, human experience throughout its length and breadth is a unity. I pointed out that our conceptions of science forbid us to assume that we have arrived at knowledge which deserves to rank as a science of human experience until our knowledge is it- self a unity, that is, balanced and interconnected reflection of the system of reciprocal influences of which we find real life to be composed. In the second lecture I argued that the very progress which has been made in the social sci- ences is one of the reasons why our present stage of scientific development exhibits a disunity of the social sciences. I repeat that I am not denying progress when I uncover this fact of scientific segregation now that scientific co-operation is imperative. If it were worth while to discuss that point further, I should urge that this very disunity of the social sciences at the present moment is itself one of the 55 56 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE proofs that science has been advancing. Some of the things that have to be done, in order to make thought about human Hfe scientific, could not have been done without going through a period of isolated special research. I mean of course that, all things considered, there were no available means of reaching our present grade of scientific progress except by this freedom of exploration, which gave everyone an open field to follow his own bent. Speaking in general of European thought from the revival of learning to the first quarter of the nineteenth century, we may represent it as occupying at most three or four separate areas, according to our system of classification, thus : Fig. A Now, roughly speaking, during the half -cen- tury between 1775 and 1825 the intellectual activities which had previously been kept within these boundaries had straggled into a large num- ber of independent courses, and from that time SOCIOLOGICAL REASSERTION OF UNITY 57 until now the whole plateau of human knowl- edge has been divded into strips set off from one another by thin streamlets of science somewhat in this fashion: a. i C t i < '' / 1 f 1 I t 1 <• Fig. B Each of these narrow lanes, which have taken the place of the broader tracts above, repre- sents a deeper current in place of the wider and shallower mass in which it took its rise. While human knowledge gathered in three or four broad basins to the end of the eighteenth cen- tury, at the beginning of the nineteenth century it began to move in an increasing number of parallel grooves which tended to develop more rapidly downward than outward. We might liken what goes on under this method to a system of parallel fluids, not directly communicating with one another, but influencing one another in some degree by involuntary processes of infiltra- tion or osmosis or capillary attraction. Now I 58 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE will not apologize for mixed figures, because there is nothing closely analogous with the exact history of social science, and I am using this clumsy jumble of comparisons to represent differ- ent phases of it. I think we are all prepared to see, however, that neither the stage A nor the stage B in social science represents anything that any of us can regard as very satisfying to any- body's conception of scientific efficiency. And neither of these stages impresses any of us as likely to be very permanent, after our attention has once been called to it. As a general propo- sition, every social scientist admits that there should be the completest possible intercommuni- cation between the divisions of social science, whether these are few or many. I cannot believe that a scientist of any repute can be found in the world today who would maintain that the means of intercommunication between the divisions of social science are as efficient as scientific complete- ness demands. To express the situation in a purely mechanical figure, which is familiar to everybody today, but would have meant nothing to anybody fifty years- ago : Before social science can pass from a relatively rudimentary stage to the next more evolved stage, its procedures must develop systems of communication that may be SOCIOLOGICAL REASSERTION OF UNITY 59 symbolized by the lines of connection on a tele- phone switchboard, thus: Accordingly there will be a direct and prompt exchange of influence not only between a and b, but between each of the separate major and minor centers of investigation and all the rest. Here the telephone figure fails, and the nearest comparison that occurs to me as a symbol of the result or output of all this telephonic communica- tion would be an ideal news-service, in which the knowledge derived by the use of all this inter- communicating machinery would be organized 6o THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE and published, not according to the standard of its capacity to arouse attention, but in the ratio of its actual importance for the different interests that make up the normal processes of life. If these rude figures have at all answered their purpose, they enable me to put before you in a graphic way the rough general facts about the role that we sociologists have assumed in the development of social science. In a word, while social scientists were nearly all so busy digging deeper the channels in their several lines of re- search that they could spare very little thought for what their neighbors were doing, or for the general situation which all this paralleling of unconnected investigation produced, here and there a few stray voices began to be heard saying that the situation B ought to be more like C. Now, this is not all that sociology has come to amount to since, but it will pay to drive this third peg down. Let us assume then for a while that sociology means no more than would be in- volved in the proposition : The situation B ought to become the situation C. That was and is the substance of the sociological assertion of the unity of social science. It is the proposition that social science is necessarily investigation of influences which human beings exert upon one another. It rests upon the elementary knowledge that human SOCIOLOGICAL REASSERTION OF UNITY 6i experience is the resultant of forces which we may reduce to two main groups: First, the reactions between men and physical nature; second, the reactions of men upon one another. In the whole realm of knowledge, there is a larger unity under which these two phases of knowledge have to be comprehended and proportioned. Speaking now only of the unity within that shorter diameter occupied by human experience in the narrower sense, the sociologists declare that the experience hounded by the reactions be- tween men and physical nature on the one hand, and the reactions of men with one another on the other, is an interconnected experience, and that we shall have a science of it only in the pro- portion of our insight into the way and degree in which each item of this experience is affected by every other item of it. Before we go farther, I will put this large generalization into a concrete form. The pos- sible illustrations are limited only by the number of situations past or present in which two or more persons have actually had any sort of deal- ings with one another ; and the difficulty is merely in selecting a single illustration which as many people as possible have done some sort of think- ing about, and which as many as possible recog- nize as a problem both scientific and practical. 62 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE Let us take the fact that the liquor traffic exists, and that indescribable evils are known to cluster around it. How shall we account for this phenomenon? How shall we place it in the network of human experience? Certain types of men easily dispose of it as one of the works of the devil, that has no part or lot with anything righteous, and that deserves no consideration beyond violent extinction. But, strangely enough, men living side by side, who are equally good parents, equally good business men, equally faith- ful to their political duties, who are equally con- scientious supporters of the church, respectively assert and deny that liquor and the liquor trade are unmitigated evils. If it comes to a vote whether there shall be saloons in a town or not, it would be a very unprecise assertion that all the good men vote one way and the bad men another. The fact is that the line of cleavage between good men and bad cannot be so easily drawn as that, because the actual meaning of the liquor traffic cannot be settled by that summary sort of distinc- tion. In an American city from twenty to forty nationalities may be represented among the voters. The attitude of the men of these different racial stocks toward the liquor business is a resultant of as many different national experiences, summed up, first, in actual physical organization, then in SOCIOLOGICAL REASSERTION OF UNITY 63 social custom, religious ban or sanction, legal status, moral standard, and economic policy — each and all modified by the personal equation of the individuals concerned. To the one man his alcohol, whatever the preferred form, seems as much a matter of course as to another man his potato or to another his pie. To some of these men alcohol in any form seems to carry the curse of God. To others the right to use alcohol as they please seems more self-evident and funda- mental than the right of free thought or free speech. Now I am not making or implying an argu- ment in support of the liquor business, nor do I mean that all citizens are bound to master the history of the customs, laws, religions, ethics, and economics of each race represented in the voting list before they decide whether their vote shall be "wet" or "dry" in a local election, any more than I would demand that a man must have a Doctor's degree in chemistry before he is allowed to turn in a fire alarm. I do mean that if we are to arrive at a scientific interpreta- tion of the liquor business, if we are to propose a scientific justification for a practical policy and program with reference to it, on the ground of the ascertained facts of human experience, if we are to reckon with the fact of experience that 64 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE community action is never long dictated by a sectional will, but that it has to be, in the long run, an accommodation of all the wills in the community, then a knowledge of all the evils of alcoholism visited unto the third or fourth gen- eration will not furnish the whole of that inter- pretation, nor of that justification. The decisive element, both on the abstract and on the con- structive side of our social science, in the item of the liquor business, will be the actual mental and moral reactions toward the business on the part of all the elements of the population that hold the fate of the business in their hands. Social science in that connection would be ex- haustive knowledge of the several national and other heredities and traditions that have prede- termined the different types of group attitudes toward the liquor business, which approxi- mately account for the attitude and conduct of individuals within the groups. Social science, in this particular, would be, on the one hand, such comprehensive knowledge of the different ele- ments which enter into the demand for liquor in a given case, and, on the other hand, such com- prehensive knowledge of the different effects of the use of liquor in a given community, that the course of action indicated by these comple- mentary kinds of knowledge might be mapped SOCIOLOGICAL REASSERTION OF UNITY 65 out and proposed to the controlling elements in the community with as much authority as at- taches to the plans of competent sanitary engi- neers for an adequate system of drainage. In other words, my proposition is that every situa- tion in our physical or spiritual life is, in an analogous way, a junction point for all the lines of cause and effect that have been set in motion by previous human activity; and that there can be no credible science of any portion of our human situation which is not in part a calculus of the ratio in which every phase of previous and contemporary activity enters as a factor into the given situation as a resultant. Now, I repeat, something of this has been understood time out of mind by everyone who has reflected upon the human lot. In a way and in a degree Homer tried to show it when he pic- tured the lines of cause and effect which he could make out, and then covered up his inability to trace actual relations farther by resorting to the stage machinery of mythical actors throw- ing their weight into the scale and queering the course of things that would otherwise have fol- lowed. From Plato to Hegel there were innu- merable advances and retreats toward and away from consistent use of this more or less fleeting perception that every human action and every 66 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE social condition or situation is, in some sense and degree, a function not only of the physical surroundings but also of every previous and contemporary human action, condition, and situ- ation. But while that perception was in the world, and while scarcely any scholar would have denied it in the abstract, it had about the same kind and measure of influence upon the actual progress of the social sciences which the belief of Christendom in eternal punishment has had upon all classes and conditions of men six days out of seven in the countries where the belief has been professed. In other words, while men in either of the lines in B above may have acknowledged, under pressure, or in response to some extraordinary stimulus to their imagination, that the course of things in their respective lines had something to do with the sequences followed in the other lines, the actual relations of the social sciences to one another was more like B than C. It was this state of things which drew from Comte in 1830 the memorable remark that the trouble with the world is the anarchy of its funda- mental ideas. What he had in mind was pre- cisely the situation represented by B. As an illustration of the situation, I may cite the preposterous proposition of von Mohl in 1859, SOCIOLOGICAL REASSERTION OF UNITY 67 when he spoke with as much authority as anyone in Germany for academic poHtical science, and when he laid down the principle in his Ency- clopddie der Staatswissenschaften that the po- litical sciences had nothing to do with political economy. As another illustration I may come down as late as 1884, and quote the opening paragraph of General Walker's textbook in po- litical economy. These are the author's words: Political economy has to do with no other subject whatever than wealth. The economist may also be a social philosopher, a moralist, or a statesman .... but not on that account should the several subjects be con- founded. The more strictly the several branches of inquiry are kept apart, the better it will be for each and all. The frankest case that ever came under my personal observation was in 1905. In that year the editor of the American Historical Review, the organ of the American Historical Association, returned to the publishers a certain rather elabo- rate book on sociology. In a letter the editor stated that the book would no doubt be of interest to sociologists, but that he could not notice it in his journal because it contained nothing that con- cerned the historian. Whether that particular book was particularly good or particularly bad of its kind is not the point. The crucial thing about (^^rBR^»r> 68 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE it for the present purpose was that two-thirds of its contents really consisted of an argument about the sort of excavating and tunneling and cross- cutting which it is most profitable to do in getting out historical material. The author may not have established his case, but it certainly is of concern to every scientific historian to know whether there are open questions in historical methodology. Until the sort of thesis which the book in ques- tion contains has been tested and disposed of in a scientific way, the historian who declares that his colleagues have no concern with it libels his profession. Besides that, he affords a sadly belated example of the stage of scientific exclu- siveness represented by the diagram B. Accordingly, beginning with 1830, there appeared more and more men who made it their business to emphasize this common knowledge of interrelations. They took as their division of labor publicity work for the perception that the kinds of human relationships which had been set apart from one another in abstract isolation by social scientists of the type B intimately and incessantly modified one another. These men began to ring the changes on the assertion that every social science is an abortion which does not adjust itself in principle and in practice to this all-pervading fact in the human lot. Some of SOCIOLOGICAL REASSERTION OF UNITY 69 these men presently became known as sociologists. They could not offer a specific substitute for the social sciences in the form of diagram B, but they preached in season and out of season that the state of things which the diagram B repre- sents was merely a passing stage in the evolution of real science, not a condition with which anyone could remain satisfied. I have hinted before that the charges which have been brought against the sociologists may be summed up in two counts : first, nobody would be fool enough to believe anything that they have to say; second, everybody always knew every- thing they have to say, and there is no use at this late day in making a fuss about it. Strangely enough, both of these verdicts were sometimes handed down by the same tribunal; yet the contradiction is not hard to explain. It is by no means wholly to the discredit of the critics. In a word, the new apostles of unity in social science felt themselves bound to declare out of hand what sort of a unity real life actually is, which the abstract social sciences had partitioned off into a collection of non-communicating com- partments. These proposed renderings of real life turned out to be analogies, and the originator of each and his imitators were understood to mean 70 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE that the real world was literally what the analo- gies represented. Of course no perfect parallel for human experience is within our range of knowledge. Life is more complex than anything incidental to it; and any attempt to picture it by means of something more comprehensible verges on the folly of the traditional Greek fool who tried to give possible purchasers an idea of what his house was like by exhibiting a brick pried from the wall. Of these exhibits which did not exhibit, people very naturally said : We will have none of them. On the other hand, it was true that everybody engaged in social science at all held some sort of notion that all things somehow hang together in human experience. The ways in which things hang together have proved so elusive that most people credit themselves with having done thei.. whole duty when they ac- knowledge the abstract proposition of unity. They want the concession treated, however, like their church confession, "We are miserable oflFenders." That is, no one should presume in everyday affairs upon this privileged communica- tion. When anybody has proposed a concrete description or theory of the unity of life to which all might have subscribed as a harmless abstract idea, the luckless presumer was treated very SOCIOLOGICAL REASSERTION OF UNITY 71 much like the occasional people who declare that they have arrived at perfect holiness. The variations of early attempts to interpret the unique unity of human experience may be reduced to three species: the sentimental, the mathematical, and the biological. The dividing line of chronology cannot be drawn between these types. All of them seem to be perennial. I will refer to them, however, in the order named. The sentimental species of sociologists — the most picturesque of them never called themselves by that name, but they were a part of the socio- logical movement, and I will not try to cover up the relationship — range from Fourier, with his harmony of the human passions and his scheme of standardizing human society in blocks of six- teen hundred persons, and Robert Owen, with his co-operative factories, to .en like Frederick W. Robertson, Charles Kingsley, and John Ruskin. Although these .latter were essentially sane, it was true of them as of the less sane of the species that their emotional reactions were more in evidence than their analytic processes. From least to most respectable, the best that can be said of this type was that their zeal was out of proportion to their knowledge. It is no won- der that they could furnish little light and lead- 72 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE ing for the realignment of science. They did a great deal on the whole to spur the world's con- science. By this they indirectly prepared the way for a reconsideration of the social sciences. On the surface, however, while they lived, they seemed to function chiefly as promoters of the gaiety of nations. They were satirized as people who demanded that the laws should give legisla- tive force to their dreams. Their ideas were de- scribed as schemes to lodge all the world in square blocks, each of whose four sides should always face the sunlight. The scorn which everybody felt, or affected to feel, for their futilities received its most dogmatic expression in Carlyle's elephantine phrase, "philanthropistic phosphorescences r The mathematical sociologists may be typified by August Comte. And I may incidentally use him besides as an illustration of a fact which is equally true of all the sociologists, namely, that whatever their intellectual faults, these faults were not strictly their own. They were rather indexes of the thinking of their time. The earlier sociologists did not invent their mental vagaries. Those whimsical methods of dealing with prob- lems which require critical processes had been nurtured and sheltered in all the sciences, and when they were used in attempts to improve the SOCIOLOGICAL REASSERTION OF UNITY 73 sciences they were themselves vivid evidences of the need of improvement. When Comte was getting his education there was probably no single book in the world which more intensely reflected the type of thinking cul- tivated by contemporary scholars than Laplace's Mecanique celeste. The first volume of this work was published in 1799. A popular interpretation of the same system had appeared in 1796 under the title Exposition of the System of the World. The Germans translated it the next year. A little later the larger work was translated into English, with valuable annotations, by our own Bowditch. Comte was a mathematician, and quite in harmony with the version which the ideas crystallized by Laplace had impressed upon the mental fashion of the first half of the nine- teenth century. Comte thought of the universe and all it contained as a unity of two comple- mentary systems of mechanism : namely, celestial physics and terrestrial physics. As everyone knows who has heard of Comte, the world pre- sented itself to him so exclusively in the likeness of mechanism that in his subdivisions of the ma- chinery he found no vocation for psychology. Human life in his rendering was a vast machine. The sociology that he offered to the world as a corrective of the dislocation of the social sciences 74 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE was a technology of social machinery, a hand- book of the soulless forces which turned the wheels of the ages. Every once in a while, even today, some smarty comes to life with the discovery that there is nothing to sociology because Comte, who invented the word, tried to explain society simply as a solar system on a reduced scale. But that hypothesis was simply the best stagger which anyone could make at that mathemati- cally obsessed time toward an intelligible ex- pression of the connection of things. The important matter was that the human mind was at that time in travail with the mighty conception of the wholeness of human experience. We are bunglers if we miss that essential fact for wonder that the idea at its birth was not full grown. The main thing was utterance of the fundamental thought of wholeness. The particular picture of wholeness which was proposed, the wisdom or unwisdom of adopting a particular scientific name for the proposing of the picture, is a relatively insignificant detail. The fulness of time had come for concerted attention to the factor of the scientific situation which had been persistently neglected, which was the pass-key to the next stage of science, namely, the universal reciprocity between the parts of human experience, which SOCIOLOGICAL REASSERTION OF UNITY 75 makes life some sort of a system of intercon- nections. What the system was, and how the sciences should be labeled after they had adjusted themselves to this cardinal perception, were details which might come along in their turn. It is no more necessary therefore for me to defend the mathematical or mechanical sociologies than the sentimental. They were merely inci- dents in the logical and psychological maturing of the human mind. They did not discover the ulti- mate terms of social wholeness, but they directed attention to the reality of social wholeness, and they thus provoked analysis that has approached nearer to a literal rendering of the reality. I class as subspecies of the mechanical soci- ologies all the attempts to state human experience in terms of geography or of economics, that is, all the attempts to show that soil and climate made the Russians Greek Christians, and the Spanish Roman Christians; all the attempts to show that the laws of economic production foreordain the statute laws of the civilized world. Much serious history has been written on the lines of this mechanical sociology, either geographical or eco- nomic; and British classical economics, from Ricardo to the secession of the younger Mill, built its doctrines on the conception of the eco- nomic harmonies, which was merely a sancti- 76 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE monlous rendering of the more general mechani- cal version of life. The primary fact in all this was that people were trying to make out the real connections between the confused aspects of human experi- ence. The detail that the first attempts were not conclusive is precisely what should have been expected. I pass to the biological sociologies. It must be remembered that just after the midde of the nineteenth century Charles Darwin was a more startling appearance in science than any comet has ever been in the physical heavens. Beyond the narrow circle of men who were beginning to exchange different ideas, and the lion's share of whose merits seems likely to go, in the bookkeep- ing of history, to Darwin's credit alone, the whole world still adhered to the conception that when the Creator of the universe one day decided that his animal collection was incomplete, and that it would be well to add cows, or dogs, or pigs, he issued an amendment to the constitution of the world, "Let there be cows, or dogs, or pigs," and forthwith there were cows, or dogs, or pigs. Among my pamphlets is a syllabus on anatomy and physiology, published in 1849 for the college class of which my father was a member. There is a short introduction on what we should now call SOCIOLOGICAL REASSERTION OF UNITY 77 zoology. It briefly describes the current fourfold divisions of animals, viz., Zoophytes^ Articulates, Molluscs, and Vertebrates — but not a hint that these different forms of animal structure ever had any more relation to one another than chance specimens of coal and marble. Then the sub- stance of the pamphlet is a description of the human body under the chief titles: first, the mechanical system; second, the nervous system; third, the repairing system; fourth, the repro- ductive system. On the whole, the syllabus is a clear and intelligible outline of the anatomical knowledge of the time, but the term by which that type of knowledge is now known, gross anatomy, fits it in more senses than one. It was merely a sort of carpenter's specifications of the human frame. There was not a hint of the elementary cellular structure nor of the processes of tissue-building. The publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 seems for a time to have totally eclipsed the memory of Laplace. Of course mediocre men did not hear of biology for decades, but all alert and far-seeing minds forthwith began to look at everything either literally or figuratively in the biological light. The world of special creations immediately began to be construed as a world of universal development. The human 78 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE experience that had been classified into groups of facts which had no dealings with one another began to tantalize the imagination with sugges- tions of all sorts of interconnections. When the biologists began to circulate those new terms morphology, histology, aetiology, ecology, etc., they proved wonderfully stimulating to all sorts of imagination, and not least so among the social scientists. Again I need not assume the role of attorney for the zealots who caught up the biological clue and commandeered it into the service of social science. They were hasty; they were extrava- gant; they often seemed to mistake pictures for reality; but after all they were merely stretching the latest interpretations of science more than they would bear. Since some of the intimate processes of organic life had for the first time been brought to light, and since these investi- gators of social facts had discovered that all the experiences of men are knitted together in most intimate relations, what could be more natural than precisely the conclusion which they drew? They put these two things together : first, human relations are bound together in marvelous com- plexity; second, biological relations are bound together in marvelous complexity. "Aha!" they SOCIOLOGICAL REASSERTION OF UNITY 79 said. "What if these biological relations should turn out to be the pattern of human relations?" Well, the suggestion has led to some very grotesque parodies of human society, but for my part I am not ashamed to say that I believe it served on the whole to promote real social science. Schaffle in Germany and Spencer in England — ^the former an economist who was ostracized by his peers for going off into such fantastic vagaries as biological versions of society, but justice is beginning to be done to his memory in apprecia- tions by leading German economists today — these two innovators, Spencer and Schaffle, set the fashion, which held its own for a couple of dec- ades, of attempting to describe the interrela- tions in human society as though human society wxre an expanded physical organism. Again all sorts of fun were poked at soci- ology because it was supposed to consist in the theory that society is a big animal, and in giving names borrowed from biology to the parts and activities of this super-animal. I was born into this biological sociology; I grew up in it; I have been accused of perni- cious activity in helping to palm it off on the world; and I hereby utter my ante-mortem state- ment that I have nothing whatever to regret in my connection with the biological sociology. It 8o THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE was a thoroughly respectable attempt to express the literal reality of interrelation in human society in the most vivid terms available. I do not believe we should have been as near as we are now to critical insight into the facts, if we had not been schoolmastered up toward critical insight by these preliminary analogical repre- sentations. I have always had a lively contempt for people who could not or would not under- stand that this pictorial rendering of society in terms of organisms was merely a means of approaching within seeing distance of the actu- ality. Never for a moment have I meant any- thing by the device, nor have I understood anybody else whom I could take seriously to mean anything by it, which I would not in sub- stance assert today. I have simply changed my estimate of the value of that particular device for bringing the social reality veraciously before our minds. I used to think it was a useful guide to research. I now think it is of no use what- ever for strictly scientific purposes; but I believe it has a value in the earlier stages of sociological study simply as a pedagogical recourse. So much for these three attempts at socio- logical articulation: the sentimental, the mathe- maticaly and the biological. Each in its day was a serious effort to clothe a true perception in ade- SOCIOLOGICAL REASSERTION OF UNITY 8l quate expression. Each effort failed, because the perception itself had arrived after all only at the fact that some sort of social wholeness existed. It had not penetrated into the real character of that wholeness. This was the situation when an American writer published a book which was the beginning of a movement that has led the Germans to nick- name sociology "the American science." I mean Lester F. Ward's Dynamic Sociology^ of which more in a moment. My explanation of the reason why the Ger- mans allowed the Americans to take the lead in formulating sociology is that German social sci- ence has always carried in solution so much of the assumption of the interconnection of all human experience — so much more than is in French or English thought — that the Germans did not feel the need of crystallizing this fluid sociology. The Germans thought, and as a rule still think, that an independent formulation of this factor of the interlocking of all human expe- rience would be a redundancy in science. There is also more excuse for this position in Germany than elsewhere because, with all their separate- ness, the different social sciences have come nearer in Germany than anywhere else to co- operation as divisions of a single science. %2 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE Herbert Spencer was by far the most efficient press agent for the general conception of evolu- tion. Nevertheless, as has been frequently pointed out, Spencer was not himself an evolutionist. I have no time to justify the paradox beyond say- ing that while Spencer was popularizing the notion of evolution he was also circulating a theory of society which was in effect as fatalistic as the hyper-Calvinistic dogma of foreordination. With all its exuberance of biological facts and imagery, therefore, the total effect of Spencer's interpretation of society was an invincible impres- sion in the minds of those who accepted it, that although society has been evolved it is here to stay just as it is, for all that men can do to the contrary. All the evolution of society which Spencer allowed his readers to get a glimpse of had already been accomplished. At any rate nothing that men could do could alter or hasten anything. Society, in Spencer's version, was simply a gigantic organism endowed w4th an unalterable amount of energy, and this energy would inexorably redistribute itself according to laws lodged in itself. Men were simply points of the emergence of this energy. They were victims of illusions if they supposed they were generators of new energies not already striving for expres- sion in the different repositories of nature's force. SOCIOLOGICAL REASSERTION OF UNITY 8^ Spencer would have disclaimed this rendering of his philosophy, but the disclaimer could not go beyond the words. This was the general impres- sion made by his own language. To the satisfied Spencerian there was no more prospect of men's controlling the temper and policy of their society, than there was of their changing another organ- ism into a man after it had started out, for example, to be a tree. This Spencerian sociology was far and away the most influential variation of social theory in the English-speaking world when Ward pub- lished his first book in 1883. Ward was by profession a botanist. He spent his best years as curator of the department of paleobotany in the Smithsonian Institution. He is such a thoroughgoing evolutionist that he was understood, by people who did not read him to the end, as a very crude type of materialist. In fact, his book really threw down the gauntlet to Spencer's fatalistic evolution by declaring that we have reached a stage of purposeful evolution. I have often said, and I freely repeat, that I would rather have written Ward's Dynamic Soci- ology than any other book that has ever been pro- duced in America. Probably a great many other books will be read after Ward's is forgotten, because — to utter a paradox of my own — its main 84 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE idea is commonplace in popular thought, but it was new in science, namely, that ''psychic forces are as real and natural as physical forces, .... and that they are the true causes of all social phenomena." I must reserve details of this idea for later lectures. This then up to date is the gist of the socio- logical reassertion of the wholeness of human experience. The unity of experience is a psychical unity. It has a common substratum in the physical conditions out of which it has evolved and by which it is limited. But these physical conditions are the fulcrum of the mental, the tools and the materials with which the mind begins its own further type of creation, not the final bounds of creation. In brief, then, the sort of unity which we now assert in human experience relies upon no analo- gies, upon no indirect symbols. We say that human experience, beyond the conditioning physi- cal side, is incessant exchange of mental stimuli. It is the carrying-on of that rudimentary process of physical evolution which is underneath the mental range of reality, into uncharted reaches of spiritual evolution, through the application of mental forces to conscious purposes. And since we see the unity of experience in SOCIOLOGICAL REASSERTION OF UNITY 85 this literal form we have spontaneously come into a new alignment of the sciences of this unity. When I was in college, history and economics had no more dealings with mental philosophy, as it was then called, than the grocer and the hatter and the hardware dealer had with one another before the days of department stores. Today psychology is to all the rest of the social sciences as chemistry is to biology. It is the mind's detect- ive, to pry beneath the gross anatomy of social institutions and movements into the ultimate men- tal processes of human experience. Perhaps this sounds like a cryptic result after all. As my time is up, I shall have to leave it in this shape; but I shall try to show in the next lecture that this reassertion of the unity of experi- ence, and therewith of social science, for the first time brings us face to face with the literal facts, and therefore with the actual problems of society. LECTURE IV THE CENTER OF ORIENTATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE The first lecture was devoted to the proposi- tion that everything which occurs in human ex- perience has some sort of relation to everything else which occurs, and that accordingly, we can have no science of human experience except in the degree in which we make out the whole sys- tem of interrelations given in the life of mankind. The second lecture expanded the proposition that we have been going through a period of specialization in social science, which resulted in an excessive degree of isolation between artificially segregated divisions of science. This separateness had certain advantages, and it has accomplished certain very necessary results. Its obvious disadvantage was that it erected imagi- nary but effective barriers between divisions of social labor which should intimately communicate. The results presented by the sciences at this stage were like parts of a machine manufactured in dif- ferent factories, according to the ideas of differ- ent designers, and consequently difficult to fit to- gether when they come to be assembled. The third lecture showed that the sociological 86 THE CENTER OF ORIENTATION 87 factor in social science can be understood only when we give full faith and credit to its central contention, namely: This deploying of skir- mishers must be followed by a rallying in force upon some center of operations. Social science cannot be many. It must be one. The next stage of social science must be marked by a drawing together of the parallel or diverging lines of research into which it has been broken up. We must use the knowledge which we have already gained of parts or aspects or details of human experience to construct a more adequate general survey of the whole of human experience, in order that we may intelligently carry on the further work of finding out more about human relations — not merely the facts, but their mean- ings — and the work of planning the conduct of life acordingly. I tried to explain that the claim of the sociolo- gists to a hearing did not rest upon the particular conceptions or hypotheses which they have pro- posed as total views of human experience. I discussed briefly the sentimental, the mathe- matical, and the biological attempts at sociology. I pointed out that the sociologists were less producers than products of types of thinking prevalent in the world, more or less affecting all the sciences of their time; and that the 88 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE sociologists were merely making the best selec- tions they could from the means placed at their disposal by all the sciences that had gone be- fore, to start the work of charting life. I tried to make it clear that sociology today can no more be held responsible for the first attempts of soci- ologists to outline human experience, than we are bound to join the party of the White Rose or the Red, to become Guelph or Ghibelline, if we assert that it is worth while to study history. Then I added that sociology has dropped all sorts of indi- rect approaches to visualization of the wholeness of experience. It no longer operates by means of analogies. It has arrived at the outlook that human experience is the evolution of purposes in men, and of the action and reaction of men upon one another in pursuit of these changing purposes within conditions which are set by the reactions between men and physical nature. This means that we see in the experience of human society progressively complex inter- changes of mental influences within the setting of material conditions which act as a tether that fixes the possible range of physical actions. Psy- chology in application to social situations accord- ingly becomes the timely tool of precision in discovering the elements of all the interrelations that make up social experience. THE CENTER OF ORIENTATION 89 Here then is the task of today's social science: To interpret, in all their relations, the visible careers of men as expressions of their various mental reactions. Let me put this in a more commonplace way. Every man born into the world faces the problem : What sort of a place is this world anyway, and how can we make the most out of it? Not one man in a million ever reduces his life problem to this general expression; but if you could have before you a chart of all the actions ever per- formed by every man that has ever lived, you would find this general question implied by every record which you could examine. You would not find in the whole exhibit an act that was not either some petulant revolt against a given lot in life, in a conscious or unconscious attempt to test the character of the world by resisting it; or some more or less bold prying into the possibilities of life by deliberate trial of different ways of doing things; or sleepy acquiescence in the fated lot, and submission to the impression that the best to be done is to grin and bear it as well as one may. Whether we are active or merely passive occu- pants of, our posts in life, we make or we at least accept a tacit interpretation of our place. We therewith adopt a more or less restricted program 90 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE of life as a scheme of action which is within our range of possibility. Now this appraisal of our lot, and this fitting of our program to it are involved in the life of the dullest and stupidest whether they are at all conscious of it or not. These processes are in the thoughts by day and the dreams by night of a rare few in every society. In some partial form they come up in the consciousness of all but the most sodden, at certain intervals. In either case men imply or they bluntly ask this question: What sort of a world is this at bottom, and zvhat is it worth while to try to do in it? This also turns out to be the great question of science. It is the problem of science in a nut- shell. All the astronomies, and geologies, and physics, and chemistries, and biologies, and anthropologies, and histories, and so on through the philosophies, are merely different ways of working out an answer to the central human prob- lem : Of w^hat sort is the world and to what uses can we put it? Science has its place in this big mix that we call life, as the agent of all men in getting as near as possible tO' an answer to this central question. Science has other minor mean- ings, just as there are incidental meanings to food besides the sustaining of life. But the meaning that would call for science in the THE CENTER OF ORIENTATION 91 economy of human life, if all its other uses were taken away — just as the life-sustaining functions of food would be in demand if all its subordinate uses were cut off — the primary and chief function of science is to act as all the people's proxy in finding out all that can be known about what sort of a world this is, and what we can do in it to make life most worth living. I take it for granted that no argument about this proposition is necessary, sO' far as the physi- cal sciences are concerned. I therefore start with the blanket reservation that there is no possible phase of human experience which is detachable utterly from its physical conditions. With this reservation in mind, I am confining myself to the social phases of science. By far the greater mass of men do not con- sciously get beyond the question: How can we make the earth furnish the means of feeding us? Those who do get beyond this question find that it is but a step to the problerh : Supposing we have found out how to make the soil furnish food, how can we be sure that our fellow-men will let us eat it? The two questions became involved at the Cain and Abel stage of human experience and have been compounding their complications ever since. Assuming that other people are constantly 92 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE working out the answer to the first question, the "big problem of social science is: What is the character of that world which is made up of human beings, and which determines our chances of eating the food which the earth provides? If you have noticed the titles of my later lec- tures, you have seen that I had in mind not the mere knowledge phase of science, but the applica- tion of knowledge as a working rule. I shall come to that in its turn, but I am concerned here with the center from which all scientific opera- tions must be carried on, the scientific Greenwich meridian, the point of orientation from which we may take reliable bearings throughout the most complicated researches in which we may find our- selves involved. Now the cardinal fact for social science to keep in view, the point of attachment of all its different radiations, is so obvious, it is so com- monplace, it is so matter-of-fact, that when I put it into words you may think I am either trying to deceive you, or that I have deceived myself. You do not want to be put off with platitudes. You want a profound scientific principle. I shall have to face your certain disappointment at what I have to say on this phase of the subject. It will affect you as an entirely empty form of words. It is empty, however, not because it is untrue, but THE CENTER OF ORIENTATION 93 because it is in the class of those ultimate truths to which we do not expect to conform until the millennium. It is like the moral axiom : "Every- body ought to do the right thing." Nobody denies such a proposition, because the evidence in sup- port of the denial would be hard to get; but few people would admit that such a commonplace can do much to change things as they are. In reality, human experience is made up of indirect ways of demonstrating by experience that so-called practical affairs are crude barbarities until they apply such moral axioms as regulators of conduct. Let me further prepare your minds for the pivotal platitude which I shall express in a mo- ment, by recalling the notorious fact that all through the centuries during which human thought was vision-mongering before it began to be scientific, its essential vice was contempt for the commonplace, and trapesing off to something more impressive. Nobody knows, for instance, how many ages it was after people could count four, until they observed that two and two always count up four. We have records of several thousands of years of mythologizing about the movements of the heavenly bodies, before anyone was so vulgar as to drag orchard- wind falls into the case, and to suppose that there was anything 94 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE in common between them and the orbits of the planets. Now the social sciences need the same homily which the rustic father gave his son when the boy was starting out to make a fortune in the great world: "If you ever run up against any- one you're scairt of, John, remember they're only jest folks after all." The social sciences are dealing with "jest folks." We have constructed in the name of science imposing systems of abstractions and generalizations about human experience. These conceptions would lose very much of their im- pressiveness, and on the whole would present a pathetic appeal for repair and renovation, if they were reconsidered by means of this test. The center of orientation, then, for the social sciences, is the fact that the reality which they are attempting to report and interpret is simply : men paying attention to different objects, men finding other men the most difficult objects of attention, men forming valuations in view of their objects of attention, men adopting purposes in the line of their valuations, men selecting means of accom- plishing the purposes, men applying the means in efforts to realize the purposes, men passing into changed personal equations in the course of these endeavors, men applying their modified person- THE CENTER OF ORIENTATION 95 ality to objects of attention which may themselves meanwhile have remained constant or in their turn may have been modified; and so on, with altered ratios of the terms, through recurring cycles, which so far as we know are endless, in which the element of central and final signifi- cance for our intelligence is the men, the co- operating men, the conflicting men, forever | expressing themselves, forever becoming some- thing they were not, forever stopping short of their promises, forever renewing their promises, but in spite of everything and because of every- thing forever giving all the value that we can discover to the whole experience. Now, this is either bathos and bombast, or it is the most fundamental scientific truth abroad in the world today. If numbers settled the case, it is inflated nonsense. Of course these lectures are my assertion of belief that, in this instance, num- bers are wrong. My opinion proves nothing except that it is my opinion; but I frankly pro- fess the faith that what I have just said is as important for social science, and will some day prove as essential for social science as the New- tonian laws are for the physical sciences. It is not my discovery. One could wish nothing higher in science than really to have brought this truth to light ; but it is in fact the composite message of 96 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE all the science there is in the world thus far. My pride of craft makes me wish I could claim the merit of the discovery for the sociologists. I can- not even do that. All I can claim is that in com- mon with many others the sociologists have been picking up this message from our intellectual atmosphere ; but more than anybody else they are trying to make all the social sciences take knowl- edge of its meaning. If there is a fighting chance that the sociolo- gists are right, and if you men have not figured out what it would mean for your programs in social science in case we should turn out to be right, it ought to rouse every last ounce of scien- tific spirit there is in you to come up against the challenge which the thesis contains. There is more than a gambler's chance that my propo- sition has led you up to the boundary line between two epochs in science. It may be the conceit of a faddist, but if I had the floor in a congress of the foremost scholars of the world, I should use up my time arguing the proposition which I am presenting to you today. I should declare to them, as I do to you, that it is the surest land- mark which the searchlights of all the sciences together have discovered. They would think, just as you do, that the proposition is too homely to be profound. But so long as men of your genera- THE CENTER OF ORIENTATION 97 tion live you will be scientific stay-at-homes, not volunteers at the front, if you are not helping to test this theorem and to settle the issue which the sociologists have raised. I am not sure that I can put this proposition concretely enough to fix the bearing of this point of orientation more distinctly in your minds, but I will try. Suppose it were possible for us to extract all the social science that is latent in the experience of England from the Conquest to the present moment. When reduced to its lowest terms, what would that science consist of? If I have told you the truth about the center of orientation in social science, the knowledge which the experience would yield would be, in a word, an exhibit of the processes through which the men of England and the men of Normandy who confronted each other at Hastings, and the masses for whom they were proxies, were suc- ceeded by the very different men who are now Britons. It would consist more than anything else, first, in a distinct showing of the differences, the variations in the personal equations, between the earlier men and the later men; and second, in a tracing of the cycles of mental processes through which the one type of persons was suc- ceeded by the other. It would follow the clue 98 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE that the evolving process of attention, and valua- tion, and invention of means, and volition, and the reconstruction of the actors along with much reconstruction of the world which they acted upon, is the central reality in the whole experi- ence; while the more obvious occurrences in the experience fall into the rank of machin- eries and incidents relatively incidental to the main process. It would start with a manifest of the world as it presented itself to those earlier men, particularly the horizon of their relations with one another, with the valua- tions which they formed with reference to this world of things and men, with the purposes which they shaped in connection with these appraisals, the acts which they performed under the prompt- ings of the purposes, the effects which these ex- periments had upon the manner of men they were, then the renewal and the repetition of the cycle of personalization throughout the course of social experience from the earlier date to the later. Throughout the whole survey, the ways and the degrees in which the individuals reacted upon one another would constitute the larger part of the process. In all this the Englishman that was, that was becoming, that became, and thereupon gave promise of becoming, would be the essence of the reality. At every stage, the world con- THE CENTER OF ORIENTATION 99 sisting of Englishmen in their reactions with one another was remaking and being remade by the personal factors that composed it ; and everything incidental to the process, which was not a phase of the personality involved, was incomparably subsidiary to the human evolution. Again we have to reckon with variations of the two stock replies to the sociological argument : first, "All this is merely a blur of word coloring; it has no meaning"; second, "This is precisely what all the social sciences are doing, and always have been going, and all this flourish by the soci- ologists is like nothing so much as farmer X's rooster crowing after farmer Y's hen has laid an egg." The ignorance of the former objection is so far beyond help that I leave it to stifle in its own smugness. There is something in the second objection; that is, it must be taken seriously, in order to bring out just what my thesis means, and to show that the objection lies against a thor- oughly false assumption which my proposition might imply but does not. The objector of the second type who sees no force in the sociological proposition is inclined to treat it as slanderous toward all the older social sciences : "What else have we been dealing with," he demands, "but man and his fortunes?" lOO THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE There is nothing grudging in my reply that, apart from the Httle which each of us may have learned through his own individual experiences, most of what we know about the life of men has been mediated to us in one way or another by the social sciences. I am not an unwilling witness that all the ability we have to propose problems of human relations is a result of the tutelage of the social sciences. If that were the item in point, I could as gratefully as anybody eulogize our predecessors in all the social sciences, who have perfected tools of research and collected material in which our successors w^ill discover much that we do not detect about the human processes. I am not defaming the social sciences, but I am trying to locate the bigger things still to be done. What I mean may be illustrated by my own experience in connection with the "classics." It would contradict all my claims about the value of studying human experience if I denied that the Greek and Roman classics are worth studying. The way in which I was compelled to study Greek and Latin did not give me a fair chance to make the study worth while. The claim was, and I now believe the truth is, that the Greek and Latin literatures are worth study because they contain the thought and interpret the civili- THE CENTER OF ORIENTATION lOl zation of two marvelously significant groups of men. In my own case, I had studied Latin six years, and Greek five, before I began to be con- vinced that those men had any thoughts, and it was much later before I got anything resembHng a definite perception that they had a civiHzation. There was certainly some screw loose between the theory and the application. The only thoroughly lodged impression in my mind was that those people, celebrated for their thought and their civilization, really had nothing but a grammar. To the same effect is another detail of my own experience. From the time when I began to talk, I was taught something about the Bible every day until I entered college, and nearly every day until I received my baccalaureate degree. But I was twenty-two years old — I distinctly remem- ber time and place — I was wandering aimlessly among the shelves of a theological library, when I came upon a book with the words upon the cover : Kuenen. The Religion of Israel; and for the first time the idea broke into my mind that Israel really had a religion ! Whether the fault was mine or the teachers' or both does not affect the point of the illustra- tion in the least, namely: we may expend the whole force of our minds, and exhaust all the technique of our science upon material sufficient I02 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE to interpret men, but in spite of all, it may turn out that we have indirectly and imperfectly studied men. It may prove that we have studied adumbrations of them or tangents to them. We may have mistaken some of the things they have done for some of the things they were. We may have become so much interested in men's gram- mars or their scriptures that we have overlooked the makers of grammar and scripture. Let me still further guard myself against the suspicion that I am belittling what the social sciences have done. If I did not know how to admire the labors of scholars in all the social sci- ences, and if I did not know that the value of that which they have accomplished and are accom- plishing is beyond all computation, I should cer- tainly be unfit to discuss the task that remains. I am not engaged in depreciating the work of past scholars, nor of denying the importance of the work of present scholars. My concern is with the plans of scholars for the future. Are you going to be content with the social sciences in their present shape? Are you going to assume that they are as far-looking and as penetrating as they may be? Are you going to assist in turning the technical departmental lines between types of social science into caste divisions? Are you going to throw your influence on the side of THE CENTER OF ORIENTATION 103 developing a petty sectarianism in science, or are you for aiming at a convergence of all our scien- tific technique in multifocal vision upon the com- mon object? I believe your decision will turn solely on the question v^hether the issue can be put before you so that you can plainly see the two horns of the dilemma. I should have to be a pessimist if I doubted your choice when you are once within sight of the alternatives. For that reason I am urging that, with all respect for past achievements and for present efforts, the outstanding business of the social sciences is to accomplish such a read- justment of their various perspectives, with refer- ence to the central point of orientation, that they will clarify instead of confusing one another. But this is a digression. I was replying to the claim that the social sciences have always been studying men and nothing but men, and that it is ridiculous for sociologists at this late day to preen themselves over the pretense of newness in their dictum that we need to study men. To this claim that there is no call for my assertion I answer that it would presently ad- vance our social science by leaps and bounds if the scholars who now, once a year, split themselves up into little mutual admiration societies would meet together and conscientiously thresh out the I04 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE question whether they really intend to supplement one another in connected research; whether they really are combining their efforts upon a com- mon object ; whether their common interest really is the past, present, and future development of men, or something else which they have some way of placing at the center of attention. The most dynamic doctrine that could be uttered in such a company would be the proposition that the social sciences are missing their calling by groping around among the penumbras of men instead of fixing their attention on men themselves. I will make another attempt to say this more concretely. What do we do when we study political sci- ence? Do we study men directly, as they are in reality ? Let us see. Suppose we start under the guidance of the anonymous scholar who gives the Century Dictionary one of its definitions of politi- cal science. He says that it is "the science of government." Now this sounds very plain, very plausible, and very innocent. It is, as our science goes. I am not arguing that one social science is more at fault than another. I am calling attention to one of the apparently inevitable workings of our minds when we are operating the scientific processes of abstraction and analysis. The conclu- sion toward which I am arguing is not that these THE CENTER OF ORIENTATION 105 processes should be abandoned. We surely have nothing to take their place. My argument is that these processes must be reinforced by the process of synthesis, which shall organize all the partial results that abstraction and analysis reach. This synthesis must put together all the phases abstracted and the details analyzed and the rela- tions generalized. It will not give us science, or knowledge of the whole object as it is, unless it reconstructs all these aspects of the object and its relations so that they appear in the same work- ing connection which they have in reality. Now, to go on with my illustration from political science. Do you not see that when you propose to yourselves the subject "government," you deflect your attention from the real center, namely, the men governing and the men governed, somewhat as you throw the family living in a house out of your direct field of vision when you get absorbed in the architecture of that house as a problem of domestic science? What happens when we devote ourselves as specialists to one of these abstractions, such as government ? Well, that depends on a great many things; but in some degree and in some form this happens to every one of us. We credit a separate existence to the notions which go into the abstraction. We tend to think of that existence as though some- lo6 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE thing identical with the picture in our minds had a being outside of our minds. We are inclined to think of government as an incorporeal institution permeating the spaces between us, or hovering like a cloud above us. When w^e stop to think of it, we know that what we have to deal with under this term "government" is men con- trolling themselves and controlling one another and controlled by one another, and pushing and pulling every which way to change the balance of control. We know too that the things of most human interest, and so most needed in the knowledge properly to be dignified as the sci- ence of government, would begin w^ith answers to the question. Why do men w^ant to control themselves and one another? The hotter we get on the trail of the answers to this question the more we turn our backs on the artificial abstrac- tion "government," and the closer we find our- selves to the plain men who are doing all that is being done. We find that because men are men they do not live unto themselves alone, but they are what they are by mixing with other men. Then come trials of different kinds of strength between them. Whatever strength of body they have, and whatever ability to command physical means outside of their bodies, and whatever influ- ences they can exert upon one another, from THE CENTER OF ORIENTATION 107 force to love, are put at the service of their vari- ous wants, as far as possible to secure the supply of those wants for the most self-assertive, with such provision as may then remain for the less assertive. But these adjustments between the more and the less self-assertive are not simple matters. These very self-assertions are again expressions of the men. In these self- assertions the men show their make-up. They do not assert the same force, in kind any more than in degree. One man's force would have to be expressed chiefly in terms of hunger, another's perhaps in terms of superstition, anoth- er's in terms of vanity, another's in terms of curi- osity, and still another's in the spirit of team-play with his fellows. However the units concerned in the particular case may be composed, they pit themselves against one another in smaller or larger groups in a unique competition for exist- ence and for prevalence. Without carrying the illustration into greater detail, it is evident that the deeper we get into the literal processes which we bring to light when we begin to investigate the full phenomena of social control, the more does the conception "government" become inade- quate for purposes of precision; and the more are we forced back upon the homely fact of the lo8 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE make-up of men and their incessant strivings for mastery. This was virtually the point of Professor Paul Reinsch's address to the Association of Historical Teachers a few weeks ago. And this leads me to repeat that the sociologists are no longer voices crying in the wilderness. In every one of the social sciences there are influential scholars who are saying the same thing which the sociologists say. They are heading the move- ment in their respective sciences for concentra- tion around the normal human center. I might illustrate further by going into the history of that particular concept of political sci- ence, "sovereignty." This abstraction has served many purposes, but every political scientist is aware today that it came to be an opaque body between men and the meaning of their own actions. It is true in the rough, for example, that American political theories from 1775 to 1875 treated the idea of "sovereignty" as though it were an independent force as external to human wills as the phenomena of gravitation. Just as long and as far as that impression affecfts our minds, our attention is drawn aside from men as our center to some unreality constructed in the place of men. What then is the truth about "sovereignty"? Why, the word is merely THE CENTER OF ORIENTATION 109 an abstract substitute for the men by whom, in a given case, other men consent to be ruled, and for the terms under which the rule is accepted. ''Sovereignty" is merely a general symbol for certain of the more or less temporary adjust- ments which men make with one another. The same thing is more easily seen in the case of political economy. I will not assume the responsibility of deciding the question of fact, as to how far any individual economist has gone in the way of disregarding men and cutting his lines of communication with that orienting base by turning his attention to wealth. I know for instance that German political economy never fully consented to that aberration. I know that since 1872 the German economic theorists have successfully maintained that political economy must be a knowledge of men for the service of men. I know that the angle of vision in English economics has greatly changed since Marshall in 1892 defined economics as ''the study of men's actions in the ordinary business of life," and then added: "Thus, it is on one side a study of wealth, and on the other and more important side, a part of the study of man." This is all to the good, and it again illustrates the statement that the sociologists are not utter- ing outre ideas. They are simply urging that the no THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE full implications of ideas which have found voice in all the social sciences shall be respected. I know that English and American economists have advanced even upon Marshall's formulation of their problem. I am not undertaking, there- fore, in this summary review, to decide how much any individual's vision might actually have been deflected from the perspective which has men as its vanishing-point. I simply point out that in so far as you are drawing wealth into the center of your field of vision you are by just so much turning your gaze away from men as your center of vision. More than this, when you adjust your vision to the abstraction "men's actions in con- nection with wealth," no matter how you define the abstraction, you are looking at the reflection of men in a convex mirror. You do not study them in the most objective moving picture which organizes all men's actions. For instance, inspect the workings of that partly legal, partly economic concept, "property." It has been used over and over again, both in pure theory and in the discussion of practical politics, as though it were one of the unalterable factors in the nature of things. By taking the concept "property" as an eternal datum in science we have allowed ourselves to be blocked off from the sort of inspection of men themselves which THE CENTER OF ORIENTATION III discloses what "property" means. It turns out that the activities which really exist where we have set up the entity "property" constitute another type of process which men are carrying on with incessant variation. "Property" is really a collective name applied for convenience to the infinite variety of ways in which we agree to render aid to one another in holding on to things that we have acquired or in acquiring more things. Property is not an attribute of nature, it is a mode of men's actions. I may say the same thing in terms of his- tory. When E. A. Freeman coined the aphorism, "History is past politics, politics is present his- tory," he seemed to be saying something very much to the point. In a way he was, but a little reflection shows that the assertion is inaccurate in one way, because history is much more than past politics, and politics is much less than present his- tory ; and it is inaccurate in another way, because it sets up some sort of a conventionalized picture under the term "politics" in place of the reahty of men in all their involved ways of acting, 1 will not raise the question whether we are likely forever to speak of history at all as one science, or whether we shall refer to the his- torical aspects of all experience, and shall make requisitions upon historiography in all social in- 112 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE vestigation. The fact is that, however we define or describe it, historical vision is always con- cerned with real men acting; and the vision is blurred whenever we permit summarized abstractions to obtrude themselves between us and the men. If I could do so without going too far into technicalities, I should illustrate again in the case of the psychologists and their abstraction "con- sciousness." I should urge that it is quite possible to change the focus so much that men acting will pass out of the range of vision, and there will be left a supposititious something which consists of mental operations viewed in a vacuum bounded by a fictitious subjectivity and insulated from the objective processes of men's life. As a last illustration, sociology^ has furnished and is still furnishing a notorious instance of the same mistake. In groping after our center of orientation we have had recourse to the abstraction "society." Thereupon the sociolo- gists have proceeded to give pitiful exhibitions of themselves committing the very blunders which they had observed in others and which they are trying to persuade others to avoid. We have naively furnished our quota of evidence that, indispensable as it is in science, the process of abstraction is dangerous. Instead of keeping real THE CENTER OF ORIENTATION 113 men successfully in sight, we have summarized them in this artificial conception ^'society," and then we have gone on elaborating the abstrac- tion in countless unreal ways. I referred to samples of them in the last lecture. What is the reality which we get a slanting view of in the concept "society"? Why, it is men associating. The thing to find out is, why men associate, and how they associate, and by what means they associate, and why and how and by what means they vary their associations. This conception of the problem brings us again to the perception that men's associatings are not phenomena which have a transcendental exist- ence. They are only certain external phases of men's actions in their whole personality. They are the outward form of men's essential reality, in their total experience of arriving at valuations, and clutching at straws to save what seems to them worth saving, or inventing institutions to accomplish what seems to them worth achieving. People who are captious, who are zealous for some view which all this impeaches, who are not dead in earnest about making science the purest possible vicarious sacrifice for progressive enlightenment of all men, may easily persuade themselves that what I have been saying is nothing but finicky fussing with words. Men 114 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE who have been trying as long as I have to save the world by the fooHshness of sociological preaching have learned to chuckle over that brand of evasion and to bide their time. My own estimate is that we have been getting a hearing more rapidly than it was reasonable to expect. The men who really believe they can afford to treat the sociological argument con- temptuously are growing less influential every day. At the same time men of prominence in every branch of science are conceding that we have established our standing in court, although they may not admit that we have a strong case. I may sum up the sociological argument, so far as I have presented it, in a very simple way: The common object of social science is men acting. At present the older social sciences more than the sociologists are seduced by the witchery of words. They think they are still dealing with men acting, when they are becoming fascinated by abstractions from men symbolized in preten- tious general terms. The consequence is that they really substitute a make-believe world, an apocryphal world, for the human world. The corrective of falsifying abstraction is ori- entation upon the real object. The central ques- tions for social science are : What have men done and how and why, and what light does this expe- THE CENTER OF ORIENTATION II 5 rience throw upon what remains to be done, and how to do it? To answer these questions the apparatus of all the social sciences will be required. Our answers will be reliable in the degree in which we learn to use all the apparatus by co-operative methods in the common labor of the social sci- ences. The central task of social science is to understand past and present men, and to derive from this knowledge valuations of both ends and means for the use of the men we shall be tomorrow.^ * When I followed familiar usage and spoke of the twenty- four "factors" in the experience of the Germans (vide p. 16), that form of expression illustrated the very tendency against which this lecture has warned, viz., to substitute impersonal concepts for men when we attempt to report human relations. The inexact expression "factors" is of course a crude way of referring to men who had assembled results of their experi- ence in conceptions and valuations scheduled 1—24. The alleged "factors" were literally men affirming these concep- tions in their activities. LECTURE V THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AS TERMS IN ONE FORMULA I have now called your attention to four phases of the situation with which social science has to reckon: first, the phase which I have re- ferred to in variations of the concept "the wholeness of human experience" — the fact that everything which now is in human experience has some kind and degree of relation with everything else that has been and is and is to be. This fact implies that science which purports to be knowl- edge of human experience confronts the task of composing itself so that it will truly reflect this wholeness of the reality. Secondly, I have de- scribed the phase of attempted independence and self-sufficiency of sciences, which became acute as an incident of scientific specialization in the nineteenth century. Thirdly, I have told of the attempts of the sociologists to convince the other social scientists that the time is ripe for more effective scientific co-operation and centrali- zation in accordance with the indications of the whole experience to be investigated. Fourthly, I have argued that the reality which all science has to interpret is men acting upon one another ii6 AS TERMS IN ONE FORMULA I17 within physical conditions. Hence the program of conforming science to reality must constantly correct itself by reference to the activities of real men as the center of orientation. As a caption for the present lecture, I have used the mathematical or the chemical manner: "The Social Sciences as Terms in One Formula." Before I discuss the formula itself, I will try to give a general idea of what I have in mind in using that mode of expression. All that I have said so far in these lectures has implied, and I have intended it to imply, that complete social science, if it were possible, would find a place for everything in human experience and would set everything in order in its place. I presume that every social scientist of whatever specialty, and whatever his particular view of actual or desirable relations between divisions of labor in social science, thinks of such an out- come as the ideal aim of science, quite aside from opinions about human ability to approach very near to that goal. I suspect that each of us has a mental reservation to the effect that his own science, as it now stands and as he is helping to make it, will fit bodily into the whole scheme of knowledge. If we did not assume this we should be less at ease in our various academic Zions, and Il8 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE less able to ignore the whole methodological question. But in spite of this comfortable assurance the habit is growing, both on the lay public that looks to scholars for the solution of scientific problems and on the scholars themselves, of put- ting questions in a way that plays hob with the beautifully precise old statical division lines be- tween sciences. Neither layman nor scholar any longer asks as exclusively as he used to, ''What aspects of things does this or that science con- sider?" Both laymen and scholars are asking more often and more seriously: "What has been going on in the world, and what is going on, and what does it all mean for men today?" We have recently had an instructive illus- tration of this modern attitude among the physical scientists in our own university. Sev- eral years ago one of our geologists found him- self asking the question, What occurred as causes of a situation presented by the rock formations in a certain locality ? In running down the clues to what occurred that geologist found himself facing the dilemma of disregarding all the con- ventions of categorical science or calling off his search. He was already as far off his scientific preserve as he could conveniently get. Starting with the crust of the earth and the processes of AS TERMS IN ONE FORMULA 119 its formation, he noted that he was probably deahng with the same processes which had trans- formed the original star-dust into our visible sidereal system; the same processes which are now constructing the most distant nebulae into w^orlds. He saw that he could find out exactly what these processes were only with the help of difficult mathematical calculations. He saw fur- ther that the forces at work were also chemical, and that the share of these chemical processes in the actual procedure was an important factor in the complete explanation. The upshot was that the ancient ritual of scientific propriety received a ruthless shock. Regardless of the definitions of their respective fields, geologist, astronomer, mathematician, and chemist presently had their coats off and were working together to solve a real problem. The complete success of their in- quiry would register itself in some sort of statement distantly resembling a formula in mathematics or chemistry. That is, such and such quantities of this force, and such and such of that, and such and such of the other, applied under such and such conditions, gave the forma- tion in question. The result would be neither pure mathematics, nor pure chemistry, nor pure astronomy, nor pure geology, in any archaic, separatistic, schematic sense. It would be a I20 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE realistic formula of the quantities and modes of the participation of the different factors in the actual occurrence. I cannot imagine a more vivid object-lesson in the spirit of modern science. The same spirit, not yet as sure of itself, is steadily making its way on the social side, and it is this spirit for which the sociologists have volunteered to speak. The general position amounts to this: Experi- ence is a reality to be expressed by a formula, the terms of which would have to get their valu- ations through the co-operation of all the processes at our command for discovering knowledge. The combination of the terms so evaluated, assuming that the work could be made precise, would give a true equation in the form : The given experience = (?«?) {?v'^) {?w^) {? x^) (?y?) (.?0?) (?n^) The task of social science as a whole is to ascertain how to discover the values of the un- known quantities, together with the values of their coefficients and exponents, throughout the whole range of observable human experience and particularly in present situations. The sociologist had found that scholars held completely contradictory opinions about the fun- damental question whether anything remotely AS TERMS IN ONE FORMULA 12 1 resembling such a formula or capable of serving as an approximation to it is attainable. On the one hand men say : ''We cannot get a unified explanation of human experience. No such explanation is possible. All that we can reach is connected views of certain aspects of experience. We can have sciences of these several abstracted relations, but we cannot have a science of the interactions of these relations." On the other hand other men say : ''Science is a relative term at best. It does not mean omniscience even about a single subject. If it did we should have to stop talking about science altogether. There is no provision for such a thing in this world. Science is knowledge sys- tematized to the best of human power and con- nected up part with part to the extent of human ability. In its very essence knowledge is a recognition of relations. Draw a dead-line through relations that actually exist, and say to different groups of scholars, 'You must stop here, you may not pass the dead-line,' and you doom knowledge to the rank of nescience. You turn it into obscuration. So long as we do not know that the thing we study has relations out- side the range of our search, we may flatter our- selves that we can have a science of it without reference to anything beyond. The moment we \. 122 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE discover that relations connect the object with anything further, there is nothing to do but to hold our supposed science in suspension, till we find out how much that seems to be true at the near end of these relations is modified by follow- ing along toward the far end of the relations. That is, you cannot have a science of an abstrac- tion. You can have only fore-studies of those phases or aspects of the whole which the abstrac- tion reflects. Science is an accounting for all the relations which put in an appearance when we try to get knowledge. We can no longer hypnotize ourselves with the notion that we can construct science by arbitrarily ruling out types of relations which it is inconvenient to consider." Between these extreme views every scholar must find himself. There is something to be said for both extremes. As far back as we can go in the history of thought we find that some- thing was all the time being said for both. In spite of the attempts at comprehensive philosophy all the way along, my impression is that the former view has held more of the ground and a larger part of the time than the latter. How- ever this may be, we are now swinging into a scientific era in which we shall give ourselves fewer airs about the type of knowledge which becomes impressive by arbitrarily limiting its AS TERMS IN ONE FORMULA 123 outlook. We want exact knowledge whenever we can get it, but we are growing impatient with kinds of knowledge which may be made to seem complete in themselves by ruling out of consid- eration the connections with other things which contradict such completeness. The movement on the social side may be illustrated in this way: If I were called upon to mention the ten most influential books ever written in political science, I should feel quite safe in naming to any competent committee of award as one of the titles in such list Montes- quieu's Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748. That work repays careful reading today by any- one wise enough to read it understandingly ; yet it is not a textbook from which we can learn the sort of political science taught now. It gives us an impression of law as something which has a self-existent being transcending men. Probably more because of that fact than in spite of it, the workings of law as exhibited in the book seem awe inspiring. They have a certain resemblance to reality, but they are not reality. Today we want to know how men get into office, just why they want to be there, what the inside meaning is of the acts they perform when there, how legis- lative bills are framed, who starts them, by what combinations of influences they are enacted or re- 124 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE jected, what laws are enforced and why, what laws are dead letters and why, etc. But at the same time we want to get this information fitted into place with all the other classes of informa- tion that give us a general chart of the kind of program which all sorts of men in our day are following. We have less use for large generali- zations that are like graven images of symbolic society, and more use for views of men as they are in real life, even if the views lend themselves to less rigid statements than more artistically contrived symbols. Or let us take as another illustration the abstraction *'the economic man." For the larger part of the nineteenth century this conception was one of the most dependable tools that pseudo- science ever employed. But that is an altogether too familiar way of speaking of it. I should rather say it had the power and the precision of a Roman legion in attack or defense. But again the abstraction is such a thin section of life that we rate it today as an equally thin section of science. The conception of "the economic man," a human calculating machine operated solely by the impulse of material gain, misinterprets high and low in actual affairs as grotesquely as Opper's caricatures misrepresent both the mag- nates and the plain people. When Mr. Morgan AS TERMS IN ONE FORMULA 125 leaves Wall Street and for a fortnight personally conducts a train load of clerical guests to and from a religious convention on the Pacific Coast, or when he scours Europe for art treasures, he is not "the economic man" ; and for one I very- much doubt if he is in his private office during business hours. When the neighbors in the slums share their dinners with poorer neighbors, they are not "the economic man." We get nearer to men as they are today by tracing their actions back to the real mixtures of valuations and pur- poses that impel them, even though that account of their actions refuses to fit into the pigeon- holes of the older categorical sciences. A slightly different sort of illustration tells the same story, and I shall develop it at some length. The other day, I happened to take up a book published in 1908, under the title Economics, by Nearing and Watson. It w^as written as a text- book for an introductory course in economics at the University of Pennsylvania. It would be en- tirely out of my province to express a judgment whether it is on the whole a good book or a bad book for the purpose. That is not my business. In either case the book is a rather astonish- ing reflection of the modern propensity to dis- regard scientific categories and to get busy with 126 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE the question, "What is going on in the world?" This textbook in economics begins with a chap- ter on "Prosperity" ! That is very much like beginning a textbook on chemistry with a chap- ter on the food supply. Perhaps we shall come to it. I do not know. My point is that for bet- ter or for worse we are in revolt all along the line against the stilted shapings up of real rela- tions in advance which turned our whole scien- tific territory into a rococo landscape garden. At the end of this opening chapter on "Pros- perity," which could hardly have been more inclusive in its implications if it were an appen- dix to John Stuart Mill's essay on Utilitarianism, there are seven questions for study, and these furnish the substance of the present illustration, namely : . I. Should real prosperity include every mem- ber of the community f Sure enough! Should it? A decent and timely question! Who knows? Who knows how to find out? Certainly no special science that has ever been defined. An answer that pur- ported to be scientific from one of these special viewpoints would be as impertinent in general as a dictum from the American Statistical Association prescribing a standard of church architecture. What is prosperity? What are AS TERMS IN ONE FORMULA 127 its constituents ? What are its conditions ? What are its manifestations? What are its effects? The only way to arrive at even provisional con- clusions on such far-reaching questions as these — and they are all raised by the question set for preparatory exercises of the minds of Pennsylvania undergraduates — is by way of some sort of preliminary sun^ey of what is taking place on the whole in the course of human experience, determining therefrom just what we mean by the popular term ''prosperity" as a symptom or partial product in this whole sequence of occurrences, and then by ascertaining the functional meaning of "prosperity" so ex- plained in connection with the further fortunes of the men concerned. 2. Is a nation with a great foreign trade and extensive manufactures a prosperous nation f Cable "Asquith, Downing Street, Collect"! In a country with a land question, a labor question, a Lords' question, an education ques- tion, an establishment question, an Irish ques- tion, a near Eastern question, a far Eastern question, a variegated colonial question, and last but not least a Kaiser question, how much "British trade" makes or mars England's pros- perity — well it does present a rather perspicuous problem for undergraduate economists, doesn't it ? 128 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 3. What has been the most important factor in developing the present prosperity of the United States F I hope the Pennsylvania economists have found out, and I hope they will tell the rest of the world whether that ''most important factor" is still working full time. Some people think the most important factor has been the 'little red schoolhouse." Some think it has been the "New England conscience." Some think it has been the Maryland type of religious toleration. Some think it has been the Abraham Lincoln spirit of democracy, and so on. I wish I were wise enough to settle the question. I am wise enough at least to know that the question never will be settled until we have a social calculus which can strike an accurate balance between all the physical and moral and spiritual factors that have molded American experience. No special science will ever give the answer. 4. What are the chief differences between a nation in a state of economic deficit and a nation in a state of economic surplus? Any university in the world might strengthen its historical staff from the undergraduate body of the University of Pennsylvania, if those young men actually controlled the range of in- duction necessary for an answer to this general AS TERMS IN ONE FORMULA 129 question. What are the chief differences be- tween an individual in a state of economic deficit and one in a state of economic surplus? Those differences depend on more permutations of cir- cumstances than can be brought under the cate- gories of any special science. For instance : one individual is in a state of economic deficit be- cause he has dropped all his money at the race track; another is in a state of economic deficit because he has spent all he possesses and has borrowed to the limit of his credit to buy and stock a farm. One individual is in a state of economic surplus because he left the saloon, after he had cashed his pay check, without spend- ing any of his week's wages. Another individual is in a state of economic surplus because he has not had quite enough time to blow in the whole of his inheritance. The differences between these pairs of men are not describable or com- putable to any great extent in terms of the mar- ket. In like manner one nation may be in a state of economic deficit as a result of squan- dering millions in creating Versailles and in breeding its human parasites. Another nation may be in a state of economic deficit as a result of taking over monopolized lands and parceling them out on easy terms to a population of peasants that had been kept in a condition hardly 130 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE above the level of the brutes. Economic deficits, for individuals as for nations, may belong any- where in the moral scale between blessing and cursing. Our judgment of an economic deficit, as a human phenomenon, not as a mere matter of bookkeeping, has to reckon with the whole content and quality of the civilization in which the phenomenon occurs. 5. What are the characteristic features of the American state of economic surplus? Does the question refer to Pittsburg or to the Nevada divorce colony? Does it bring up the New York insurance scandals? Does it hint at those retreats for temporarily innocuous Napoleons of finance at Atlanta and Leaven- worth? Does it pry into the psychology of standpatism and insurgency? Is it prophetic of the conversion of Republican majorities of thousands into Democratic majorities of thou- sands in New York and Massachusetts congres- sional districts? Does it hark back into history and moralize on the meaning of the return from Elba? Is it a question for Fast Day or Thanks- giving Day or the Fourth of July? Is it a cue for the penologist or the preacher or the poli- tician ? 6. Should the emphasis in economics he laid on production or on distribution? UNIVER55H ' OF J AS TERMS IN ONE FORMULA 131 The question cannot be answered except as a corollary from the answer to the seventh and last: 7. What should be the goal of economic progress? If there may have been a strain of facetious- ness in my previous comments, I am now thoroughly in earnest. The fact that this ques- tion finds a place at all in modern textbooks of economics shows that there has already been a remarkable change of front in economic theory. Some economists realize this and boast of it, and even seem to think it is the one thing needful to give economic theory the floor for the closing argument on human relations. Other economists are still shy about admitting that there has been any change at all. They seem to fear that, if they should once expressly concede that eco- nomic problems must be considered from a different point of view from that of fifty years ago, some flank movement would get a start and throw their science into panic. The truth is that, at the time when English economic theory was most confident and most intolerant, it made serious inquiry into the goal of economic progress as bad form in England as the discussion of slavery was in the United States Senate during the ten years previous to 132 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE the appearance of Charles Sumner. The eco- nomic orthodoxy incarnated in Richard Cobden, and known as the doctrine of the Manchester School, was a peculiar species of moral know^- nothingism and ethical agnosticism. This is not my dictum. It w^as and is the almost universal judgment not merely of British moral philosophers, but of German economists from the middle of the century, or at least from 1870. If it be objected that the German judg- ment is an ex-part e judgment, I will not argue the point beyond observing that assuredly the Gennan party is entitled to a hearing in the court of the world's science as well as the English party. Manchesterism was a menace to human progress and an arrest of social science, not be- cause its best-known advocates were bad men, but because they were good men, able men, zeal- ous men, conscientious men, but men with a shriveled conception of the human process. They could not see that the economic process is only a primary function wdthin the whole human process. Their voice was the voice of philoso- phy. Their outlook was the perspective of "British trade." The judicial form and the logical method of their reasoning silenced many whom it did not convince, and they long held AS TERMS IN ONE FORMULA 133 their ground against socially and intellectually feebler folk whom they could neither silence nor convince. They had no means of measuring the cynicism of their view of the world. They spoke in tones of humanity and philanthropy. Accord- ing to their light they were well-wishers and even benefactors of their fellow-men; but in the last analysis their formula of life meant: There is no business but Business, and Manchesterism is its prophet. Now is there any business but "Business"? This is simply a more specific and intimate way of putting the question which I have called the great question of science, viz. : What sort of a world is this anyway f Is this a world in which "Business" is the only business or not? Is this a world in which men exist for the interests of "Business" or "Business" for the interests of men? Adam Smith, whom men have agreed to call the founder of English political economy, was no more in doubt about the answer to this question than you and I are today. But from the beginning of the attempts to build English eco- nomic theory on Adam Smith's foundation down to the time when the younger Mill became the enfant terrible of classical economics, there was diminishing freedom in England to recognize the existence of such a question ; and this attitude of 134 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE mind has left an influence as late as our own time. It is a part of the present aloofness of the social sciences of which I spoke in the second lecture. Scholars in the different social sciences have not yet arrived at an explicit understanding with reference to the methodological place which belongs to "Business" and the theory of it. I do not know whether the specific incident of the proposal of this particular question in an elementary economic textbook in the University of Pennsylvania has much or little symptom- atic meaning. That is not the point of the illustration. The main thing I am getting at is that there is a world of difference between any alleged science, whether economics or history or sociology or whatever, which assumes that its province is a portion of reality which may be considered as existing in, of, for, and by itself, and a science which perpetually holds itself responsible for connecting itself up with the whole process of life. Summing up this long-drawn-out illustration and all that led up to it : We are merely putter- ing with scientific trifles, not proceeding toward scientific interpretation, unless our research is constantly controlled by orienting reference to the larger functionings of all that we investigate. How can we tell whether the emphasis in eco- AS TERMS IN ONE FORMULA 135 nomic theory should be on production or on distribution until we decide, in some provisional way at least, what the goal of economic progress should be? And how are we to decide what the goal of economic progress should be? Shall we decide by allowing a certain type of economic interest to close the debate by edict, or shall we decide by bringing all economic relations under the lime-light of all the experiences of life which we can now command, and by finding out what their actual functionings are in the whole human process ? The discussion in the previous lectures cer- tainly licenses me to answer the question tersely, without liability to the charge of dogmatism. It is not sentimentality, it is cold critical science which declares that every activity of life must be held answerable to the whole of life. We are not uttering a sectarianism, we are voicing the converging indications of all the science there is in the world today, when we declare that social science as a whole, not the preconceptions of any of its parts, must render the decision when, and how far, and under what conditions, any type of human activity — the economic for example — may be treated as an end in itself, and to what extent, before and during and after the analysis of it in isolation, it must be judged as means. 136 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE The stake that I want to drive down in this lecture is, that all our social science, ragged and random as it is according to the standard of the exact sciences — all our social science together amounts to a certain tentative survey of life as a whole. This survey is a competent provisional measure of the subordinate functional value of any type of activity within the whole. This sur- vey gives us a connected view of life; not a com- plete view but at least a loosely coherent view, a view which is convincing as far as it goes, a view which is itself engaged in a constant process of correction, a view that may be shaped in a formula, although the formula is after all only a guide to further inquiry. This view of life com- pletely effaces the view that ''there is no other business but Business." The big business of men is to find out the capacities of things, and to find out the capacities of themselves, and in and through and because of all this finding out to har- ness all the physical and moral forces within human control into the main enterprise of trans- forming all the forces into completer men. The task of science is primarily to understand how far men have gone in filling out this career, and then to take account of the capital at their dis- posal for continuing the career. My preparatory illustrations have taken so AS TERMS IN ONE FORMULA 137 much time that I must pass abruptly to my for- mula. I simply interject the remark that the formula which I shall talk about now does not purport to be a solution of the symbolic equation referred to at the beginning of this lecture. I am dealing rather with the equation which states our question, not with the one that settles it ; that is, the equation analogous with that with which we begin our simplest algebraic inspection. Just as we say at the beginning of the statement of the simplest algebraic problem: "Let jr=the unknown quantity" ; so the social sciences have reached that stage in their adolescence at which it is enlightening to state their problem in the form: Men's experience is the evolution of human values^ This then is the central formula by which all the social sciences today are expected to organize their reports of the human reality. I could not find it in my heart to be very angry with you if you should reply that this formula says nothing. It would not surprise me if you should find in it merely that most vapid of platitudes known to the logicians as ''the iden- tical proposition." I could not blarhe you for the retort that it would be better to give up the pretense of having arrived at an actual perception, 138 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE and to admit that my ideas have reached a dead center. It would not be strange if you should accuse me of thinking I have really said some- thing, when my formula actually reduces to this : Human experience is human experience ; or, Human progress is human progress. I have indeed brought these charges against myself over and over again; and nobody is as much interested as I am in allowing them all the weight they deserve. The more I test the for- mula, however, the more I am convinced of its value as a tool; but I must take time to explain further that its value is not that of a settlement of anything. It is a gain to use this formula simply because it brings the whole range of investigation in social science within a field of view where it can be intelligently surveyed. As in the analogous algebraic case, our formula is essentially more interrogative than indicative. At the same time the question which it asks calls for interpretation of all the evidence in connec- tion with the true center of orientation. If I wxre trying to explain my meaning to an audience of biologists, I should venture, as a layman in their subject, to draw an illustration from the history of biology. If I correctly under- stand the facts on the biological side, biologists AS TERMS IN ONE FORMULA 139 would be better able than social scientists to see the force of the comparison. In brief the analogy is this : For a consider- able time after the publication of The Origin of Species the scholars who were convinced by it believed that Darwin had accomplished more than presently turned out to be the case. That is, it was assumed that he had not only established evo- lutionism in the place of creationism, but that under the rubric "natural selection" he had dis- covered the exact process of evolution. There was a time therefore during which the theories of Darwinians might have been reduced to the formula : Evohition is natural selection. In other words, according to this interpretation the whole life process is an unfolding from within, not a molding from without; and second, "natural selection" is the method of that process. But there came a time, and I suppose it may be marked approximately by Weismann's appear- ance in the field, when biologists began to realize that the phrase "natural selection" had not cleared up the mystery of the life process, but had merely given a convenient name to the mys- tery. It had not explained the evolutionary pro- cess. It had merely focalized the fact that there is a process, and it had more explicitly asked the question. What is the process} Suppose that I40 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE when biologists had gone so far one . of their number had declared that the general formula of the life process is: Evolution is natural selection. It would have been quite in order then for the more acute thinkers to say: "It was merely an identical proposition. That only says evolution is evolution. So much goes without saying. By giving the name 'natural selection' to the undis- covered processes through which evolution goes on you have not detected the methods of those processes. You do not get ahead by calling those unknown processes 'natural selection.' You simply tag them with a new label. The problem still remains : What are the processes? " As an obiter dictum I might add that, from a layman's point of view, this'^upposition fairly, sums up the general course of thought among the biologists duiMig the. past fifty years. Whether this estimate if correct or not, I hope the situation which I have supposed among the biologists, for the sake of illustration, will throw seme light on the situation in social science. As 1 see it, sociai science in general is now in a stage analogous with the pre-Darwinian stage in biol- ogy. There were men before Darwin who be- lieved that the processes of life developed from within instead of being determined from without. It was not until the Darwinian period, however, AS TERMS IN ONE FORMULA 141 that close analysis of the method of that unfold- ing process began to make it seem very real. Be- fore that time science was having all it could do to establish the presumption that organic life his- tory is essentially an internal, not an external, process. With Darwin and Wallace and their kind this alternative passed out of the range of scientific discussion. The presumption had be- come a conclusion, and the problem thereafter was not, Is the life process internal? but. What is this internal process? As a general proposition social science the world over is not pre-Darwinian in the sense that it makes no use of the ideas of growth, of development, of evolution. In fact most social scientists imagine that tKey have fully "assimilated the idea of development from within. Their language* is saturated with the forms of the idea, and nine out of ten of them would indignantly deny that they lack any of its spirit. But really the sort of process which' most social scientists are actually presupposing, is as external to real men as theological creationism was to the life history of organic species. Our social sciences are making of human experience not the givings and takings of actual men in their processes of accomplishing their several purposes. Our social sciences are still finding in human experiences the 142 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE mystical maneuverings of those hypostatized entities that I spoke of in the last lecture — institutions, government, law, property, capital, labor, and what not. In our theories of experi- ence these abstractions and generalizations from men's activities compose a fictitious world utterly external to the real men acting. These real men look to the objective critic, and they seem to them- selves as out of place in such interpretations as visitors from the country do in their actual plight when they get caught in the swirl of the city. One of the reasons why the sociologists have had such a hard fight for a hearing is that we have tried to turn attention to the later problem before social scientists had solved the earlier problem. We have tried to show our peers that we ought to try to find out what the internal human process is, before it was settled in their minds that there is an internal human process as contrasted with an external. It is in this state of social science that my for- mula fits, and it is to social scientists in this state of mind that my formula is addressed. Social scientists are not metaphysicians any more than the biologists are. There may be, outside of our range of discovery, cosmic and transcendental meanings within which everything pertaining to this planet has the same ratio of importance AS TERMS IN ONE FORMULA 143 which our world's dimensions have to the extent of the physical universe. That, however, is not the affair of social science. Its task is to find a coherent meaning for that part of experience which is within human powers of observation. Men are not competent to prove that men are the most valuable phase of the universe. With their present knowledge, however, men are unable to locate anything within their ken which appeals to them as more valuable than men. Whether new light might dawn upon us to modify this judgment it would be idle to guess. The fact is that for our present intelligence the meaning of this world culminates in its furnishing resources for the evolution of the values of men. No man can prove why our world exists at all. On that question we have only religious and speculative beliefs. But the world being given, and our experience with it being as it is, no interpretation of it can permanently convince our minds which does not make it a system of means and ends with their provisional terminus in men. The utmost stretch of our imagination ends with the thought that other sentient beings in the uni- verse may be vastly superior to men, and vastly more important in the final accounting; but since this is merely conjecture our interpretations lose reality when we attempt to explain beyond human 144 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE values. No argument can convince men," for instance, that their place in the economy of the world is to keep up the productive powers of the soil by fertilizing it with their decaying bodies. Or again, no logical contradiction would be involved in an argument to the effect that the ultimate meaning of men is their employment as a self -perpetuating stock company to stage those hypostatized abstractions of which I have spoken. When brought face to face with alternatives of this sort, however, men find themselves more and more unable to assume that any possible argu- ment of -this kind can correspond with reality. Our judgmeiits" of means and ends all point in the other direction. Everything else mundane is means to men, and men can be rated as means only to completer men. But men are not constant terms in a world equation. Men are hot, like the atomicities and specific gravities of chemical elements, fixed and unchanging. Men are evolving combinations of qualities and capacities. We all know this, although' we' have not yet put the proofs of it in such evident* order that it is a very vivid truth. If necessary to illustrate we might recall the fact that the ancient man was a 'tool user, while the modern man is a machine user; the ancient man relied upon his individual memory, the modern AS TERMS IN ONE FORMULA 145 man employs all sorts of records, or, as they have been called, the social memory; the ancient man was relatively unfit to co-operate with his fellows, the modern man is relatively adjustable to co- operation with his fellows; the ancient man was relatively unsympathetic, the modern man is rela- tively sympathetic. These obvious and familiar differences are merely convenient representatives of innumerable more minute and complex con- trasts between less evolved and more evolved men. Now in all that I have .said I have not been trying to put an argument in the form of logical premises and conclusions. I have been trying to exhibit the association of ideas that is* steadily arranging itself in our thoughts. We are putting these two distinct judgments into touch with each other: first, we interpret the experiences of life in the final appraisal as means to the uses of men; second, we interpret men as evolving values. All that I have argued then is simply a digest of these combined judgments. I have urged that the scientific view of the world, so far as we have got it, comes out at its clearest expression in the formula: The experience of men is the evolution of human values. This result does not of itself add to the sum of our knowledge, and I am taking special pains to guard myself so that I cannot possibly be 146 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE understood as supposing that it does. The im- portance of the formula is in the added distinct- ness and unity which it gives to our problem. When we arrive at this outlook our vague ama- teurish question : ''What sort of a world is this anyway?" — or I might better say our vague mooning unconsciousness that all science has a question in common — begins to emerge from this condition and to ask the less vague and more critical, more related questions: ''What are human values? Why are they? How may we know them? How are they produced? How are they to be rated one with another? How does such knowledge of them as we may get bear upon our programs of life, that is, upon further production of human values?" In other words, recurring to the previous comparison, the formula Men's experience is the evolution of human values is a signal for the same sort of search into actual processes which began in biology with the belief that evolution is "natural selection." Now I know very well that the whole plan of these lectures impresses you as so remote from your interests that you have hard work to force yourselves into attention to them. This is pre- cisely the state of mind which gives sociology its vocation. As a general proposition social scien- tists are not interested in the fundamental logic AS TERMS IN ONE FORMULA I47 of the relations which they profess to interpret. Their interpretations have consequently been piti- fully superficial, fragmentary, and incoherent. Some scholars could not see the forest for the trees. Some could not see the town for the houses. Some could not see men for their cranial dimensions. Some could not see them for their different technical devices. Some could not see men for their diversified arrangements for group control. Some could not see men for their lan- guages, some for their varieties of religious belief, and so on, and so on. From the beginning the sociologists have undertaken to convince all their fellow social scientists that it is a radical blunder not to undertake a general survey which might bring all these phases and incidents of experience within some connected view. We have made all sorts of false starts in our approaches to scholars of other ways of thinking. On the other hand, from their own points of departure and without attention to the sociologists, scholars of other ways of thinking have been approaching the soci- ologists' way of thinking. Today there is so much of this general logic of experience in the premises of each special division of social science that you will never rise above third-rate rank in any de- partment of social science unless you have oriented yourselves by this primary methodology^ 148 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE In spite of our specializations and our dis- tracted inattentions human experience is a con- nected enterprise. It is the experience of the eadier man-brute skulking in his cave with his she-brute mate, becoming himself in drawing near to his kind, in pitting himself against his kind, in joining hands with his kind, and finding himself in progressive partnership with his kind. This evolution is not ending but beginning. Social science is the self -consciousness of this experience. It is men's self-knowledge of the values thus far achieved ; it is men's .perception of other values within 'their powers of realiza- tion; it is men's acquired technique for carrying oh the achievement; and it is further 'pursuit of the achievement itself. In these lectures so far I have merely located the center of orientation, and indicated the out- look of the social science which aims to survey life from this point of vantage. In the lectures that remain I shall try to show how this idea of science in the large works out in certain more specific aspects of the human problem. LECTURE VI THE DESCRIPTIVE PHASE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE The five lectures that are behind us in this series have presented a view of social science which may be found piecemeal in a great many books, but I cannot refer to a writer who deliber- ately sums up the case just as I have presented it. In a way Professor Robert Flint's last book, Philosophy as Scientia Scientiarum and a History of the Classification of the Sciences; in a way Wuhdt's Methodenlehre; in a way Schmoller's Grundriss der allgemeinen Volks- wirthschaftslehre; in a way Bernheim's His- iorische Methode, and a great many books of smaller caliber contain, partly in terms partly by implication, all that I have said. Before expanding the argument more con- cretely I must hark back to my earlier statement that the general outlook of the sociologists is not essentially different from that of most social sci- entists today who have any outlook at all. The peculiarity of the sociologists, in contrast with the fnajority of their colleagues, is that the'sbci^ ologists insist that all social science should take these solar observations every dayi arid r should 149 150 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE compute its course with reference to them; while other social scientists as a rule regard these ori- enting calculations as more or less useless for practical purposes. Sociologists have contended for the principle that the aim of social science should be nothing less than coherent interpretation of human experi- ence in the large. Men who propose a more restricted scope for social science, or for a self- sufficing fragment of it, have accordingly regarded the sociologists as visionaries who were concerning themselves merely with castles in the air. These are the men who have looked upon sociologists as reincarnations of astrology and alchemy, as kinds of people who take them- selves away from contact with the substantial things of science and who conjure with unreali- ties. I have found a passage in an obscure Ger- man writer of the eighteenth century, in which geographers are held up to ridicule and contempt for precisely the same reason. They are said to care for nothing that takes place on the earth, but to be busy simply in drawing imaginary lines. Trying to see ourselves as others see us, we sociologists must admit that appearances have been against us. Our attempts to plot human rela- tions in the large, without confining ourselves to THE DESCRIPTIVE PHASE 151 any single group or activity of men, have very naturally impressed people who were dealing with more particular material much as representing the earth as criss-crossed with meridians and parallels must have impressed men who measured their land by the number of their horses' paces, or who traveled by following the beaten roads or the natural landmarks. But in fact, just as the geog- raphers' real interest was not in the imaginary lines but in the continents which the lines helped them to understand, so the sociologists' real interest is not in the abstract schematology of human relations which we are working out but in the experience of the men reflected in those forms. More than this, by our fault or our mis- fortune we have created the impression among other social scientists that we are fantastically credulous about the possible competence of social science. We are supposed to imagine that a geometry or an algebra of human experience is possible which will measure the life of man- kind in all its dimensions from beginning to end. The truth is that we probably have at least no more extravagant ideas about the reach of our possible knowledge than other social scientists. On the contrary, we have contended that the older phases of social science are resisting exposure 152 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE of the comparative flimsiness of their results. This exposure would inevitably follow analysis of their program along the lines of actual rela- tionship which sociology has drawn. Our real fault consists not in overrating the possibilities of the science that may be, but in too irrever- ently uncovering the nakedness of the science that is. At different times I have met quite a num- ber of people in Europe who wanted to talk about our Civil War, and who had settled opin- ions of a rather explicit sort about the future of the United' States. Before they had gone far, most of these people dropped some remark which plainly showed that they supposed the war be- tween the states was fought in South America. Nothing more is necessary to explain why their theories about the future of the United States wxre more amusing than cogent. The sociologists urge that our social sciences have proceeded in accordance with amateurish notions of the motivations and the relationships of the different human conditions, interests, and activities, somewhat like the notions of the earth's surface which prevailed before the geographers had fairly visualized locations and proportions. We have urged and still urge that the conclusions reached by students of human exjperieiice, from THE DESCRIPTIVE PHASE 153 whatever angle, would be protected against pro- vincialism and immaturity if they were obliged to check themselves up by comparison with the charts of human relationships in general which the sociologists are constructing. On the other hand, my impression is that the sociologists in general are more interested in stimulating a demand for effective co-operation between social scientists of all kinds than they are in building a more stately hermitage for soci- ology. I do not feel quite as sure about this lat- ter conjecture as I do about the general argument which I have thus far presented. From this point to the close of these lectures therefore I shall speak for myself alone. This is not because I want to break away from the body of sociolo- gists, but because we come now to the point where the real test of the meaning of the socio- logical movement for social science in general is to occur. The sociologists have arrived at no very specific agreement among themselves about the ways in which they propose to meet the test. I want to make it very clear, therefore, that in what I shall say in the remainder of this series I am assuming the entire responsibility. I am not committing any of my fellow-sociologists to my program. It may be that other sociologists would not indorse my conclusions. My impres- 154 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE sion is that no sociologist is likely to question the desirability of the policy I shall sketch, con- sidered by itself. There may be a good deal of objection to my apparent surrender of the claims of sociology as an independent science, and to my almost complete silence about the inside phases of it, which are the technique of specialists in its peculiar subjects. f As to this I simply recast what I have said f before : There is no such thing as an independent I science in the strict sense. That whole manner I of speaking, and the whole organization of I the personnel of science in accordance with it, i mark a juvenile stage of scientific consciousness. There are detachable processes of investigation, and there are relatively isolated phases of reality to be investigated, but the thing to be known in the final summary of investigation is a con- nected whole. To the extent that processes of investigation become actual contributors to the completest power of knowledge, they are neces- sary co-operators with other processes in con- trolling all the facts about this whole. In these lectures I am not particularly concerned about bringing sociology into the foreground, nor about discussing its peculiar problems or processes. I am interested in showing that there are problems THE DESCRIPTIVE PHASE 155 and processes which are common and vital to all social science. If so much can be established, I have no fear about the ability of the sociologists to make good in their special part of the co- operative work. In passing to the application of what I have said under the five earlier titles, I must again call attention to the fact that social science in the United States has not outgrown leading ref- erence to the question, What can we make out of our subject that will be taken up by the Bird Center High School? I will not compromise my cause by consenting to the inference that I think this question never should be asked. In the long run, science, like all other human achievements, can be only a certain stage in advance of general intelligence. If we were calculating for the future of science on its own account alone, we could not afford to ignore the Bird Center High School. On the other hand, there are quasi-scientific pro- cesses, with the pedagogic interest chiefly in view, which have the same relation to the in- crease of knowledge that selecting school fur- niture to match the lengths of the pupils' legs has to research in physics, I do not say that too much attention has been paid in the United States to the organization of such knowledge 156 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE material as we have for use in our schools of all grades. I do say that we have released too little research ability. We have dedicated too little force to the untrammeled function of making knowledge broader and deeper. I shall say something later -about the pedagogical uses of social science. At present I am not referring to that consideration at all. Of course science would be like music in a popu- lation of the deaf if there were no provision for its publicity. That, however, is a matter logically subsequent to the work of gaining knowledge. At present therefore I am referring altogether to the interests of research. Leaving further qualifications until later in the discussion, I resume the main line of argu- ment. I have said that the primary function of social science is to interpret men's experience in passing from stage to stage in the evolution of human values. Suppose the men available for research in social science in a university with the equipment of ours should come to substantial agreement about this proposition. Suppose they should deliberately resolve themselves into an institute for investigation in social science. Suppose they should adopt the express purpose of contributing toward answering the question : What is human THE DESCRIPTIVE PHASE 157 experience, and how stands it here and now with the values that make up its meaning? Sup- pose my colleagues delegated me to draft a plan of procedure in furtherance of that purpose. I should begin with a brief digest of the reasons which had led to the formation of the institute or academy of social science. I should recommend that a chairman of the body be chosen from time to time and that the selection in each case should have reference to the particular kind of work then in progress. I should hope accordingly that the chairman chosen at the out- set would be a man of catholic intelligence and interest about social science as a whole, and able to maintain an attitude of judicial impartiality between the claims of his own particular prob- lems and those that are waiting for solution elsewhere. The first business which I should propose after the body had elected its chairman would be consideration of the question: What piece of work within the field of social science may we most profitably undertake? The course of thought which had led to the combination for co-operative research would have demonstrated the necessity of this first step. Everybody would have become aware, even if only dimly conscious of it before, that an organi- 158 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE zation numbering perhaps not more than forty scholars could hope to make a real contribution to social science, as distinct from a mere re- arrangement of existing knowledge, only by selecting some passage or aspect of human experience, and by intensive work upon it with all the means of investigation controlled by the group. Suppose that all the difficulties involved in such a choice were overcome, and that the group had decided to investigate the experience of the French from the death of Louis XV to the fall of the first Napoleon.^ The next feature of the plan which I should propose would be the passing of the group into committee of the whole with a historian as chairman. Of course a task might have been undertaken in which a political scientist or an economist would be a more useful chairman. The first task which would confront the group under the formation suggested would be that of taking into consideration the state of ^ For reasons which will appear in the next lecture, I add the comment that no opinion about the relative im- portance of this particular passage of experience was im- plied by taking it as an illustration. In these lectures I intentionally refrain from expressing my own views about the kind of investigation which it would be most service- able for such an institute to undertake. THE DESCRIPTIVE PHASE 159 the evidence, and of the theories that have been advanced about the meaning of the evidence, as a preliminary to its own discussion of the situation. I use the designation, "the descriptive phase of social science," for this particular aspect of every scientific process. Neither on this phase nor on the others to be treated in the following lectures can I go into minute questions of tech- nique that come into prominence in the respective stages of investigation. I can refer only to cer- tain cardinal methodological considerations. Let us suppose then that we have gone so far as to face the question, What is known cmd what has been thought about the selected pas- sage in the experience of the French? I am not now leading up to a particular scheme of descrip- tion. I have no theory of my own to exploit about the meaning of the French Revolution. I know simply the more familiar literature of the subject. I have gone into it just deep enough to be convinced that very few last words have been said about its meaning, and the more final they seem the more commonplace they are likely to be in effect. On the other hand, the attempts to interpret the facts have left me in precisely that state of suspended judgment with i6o THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE which it would be desirable for our committee of the whole to begin its work. Assuming a condition of complete open-mind- edness; assuming that the scenes in the human drama enacted by the French between the dates selected mean something as a fragment of all human experience; the task of our committee of the whole is to get at a description of the facts just as they were. For over a hundred years the historians have been showing that this process of ascertaining the bare facts is by no means as simple as it sounds. I cannot rehearse even the chief points of their discoveries in this connection, but I must seize upon one main feature of the whole affair. The historians found it out for themselves, but the sociologists have taken up the discovery and I think they have added something to the histori- ans' use of it. The moment the committee moves in the direction of the task of exhibiting the facts, it encounters the reality which I spoke of in the last lecture, namely: No fact can be described just as it zuas unless it is described in all of its functionings as a phase of the whole com- plex of experience within which it occurred. Robert E. Lee obeyed the mandate of the state of Virginia, not that of the federal govern- THE DESCRIPTIVE PHASE i6l ment. Was it consummate treason or consum- mate patriotism? Men are still describing it in both terms, according to the point of view. In reality it was neither. It was the reluctant choice of a noble man caught between the con- flicting duties of an impossible situation. No one can interpret Robert E. Lee without inter- preting the whole previous history of the United States, and not the political history alone but the industrial, social, and religious history as well. I may be allowed the remark in passing that, in my modest opinion, we have not yet so exhausted the interpretation even of our brief American history that the sort of co-operative work upon it for which I am pleading would be thrown away. But this is the point: If we cannot interpret the crucial act in the life of one man without interpreting the history of his whole nation, how much less can we interpret the thousands of lead- ing and the millions of led French, from Rous- seau to Robespierre, and then from the tenth Thermidor to Waterloo! Suppose our committee of the whole is thor- oughly alive to all this. At the outset of its work of describing the French as they were in 1774 it encounters the puzzling fact that they l62 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE too were historical products. In order to begin to describe them the committee must be informed about their antecedents. Some provisional satis- faction of this requirement must be reached, or there could be no intermediate study of experience until we had made out absolute beginnings and had reconstructed the historical sequence in full to the date of the proposed inquiry. Let us suppose that the committee has some- how adjusted this difficulty. How should its work proceed? As I am merely a layman in knowledge of the period I have chosen for illustration, I make no apology either for the purely conventional or for the unconventional part of my approach to a schedule of the subdivisions into which the work of assembling and of sorting the evidence and the hypotheses would fall. The usual device of subcommittees for differ- ent parts of the work may be taken for granted. My plan would accordingly provide for a sub- committee on organization with reference to the particular work in hand. It would be the duty of this committee to recommend a list of sub- committees adapted tO' the division of labor which seemed provisionally expedient; it would be the further duty of this committee from time to time to recommend reorganizations of the sub- THE DESCRIPTIVE PHASE 163 committees as the progress of the investigation might indicate. As this subcommittee on organization would presumably be composed of men whose study of the period had given them somewhat definite opinions about the content of the experience to be described, these same men might also be charged with the duty of presenting a general working sketch of the facts to be investigated. For further purposes of illustration I will anticipate the first report of the subcommittee on organization. It very properly puts at the head of the list a subcommittee on general bibliog- graphy. On this committee at the outset the rough work would fall. On an extended scale its initial procedure would be that which every lecturer on history to graduate students under- takes in a more limited way in connection with each of his courses. It would be the duty of this committee not merely to collect the most important titles, but to classify the significant literature on the period from two points of view : first, with reference to the kind of sources used and the methods of using the sources; second, with reference to the hypotheses or pre- suppositions by which the different writers had wittingly or unwittingly guided their work. The reports of this subcommittee from time 164 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE to time would inevitably have the effect of rec- ommendations about the divisions into which the descriptive work should fall. Whether the members of this subcommittee had begun the work with or without decided opinions about the groupings of facts within the period, they would surely gain impressions from their assortings of the secondary literature which would make them earnest debaters in the later consultations of the whole body. They would arrive at firm convic- tions about the necessary classifications not merely of the secondary but of the primary sources. It is altogether probable that they might reach judgments about tentative schemes of de- scription quite at variance with those submitted by the subcommittee on organization. If the evi- dence should lend itself to more than one hypothesis, every difference of this sort would tend at last to make the work of the whole body more convincing. I assume that the subcommittee on organi- zation would be better acquainted than I am with the period in question, and would be able to pro- pose more adequate tentative subdivisions of the work than I could. My further anticipations therefore are merely the conjectures of a lay- man about possible divisions of labor. The specifications which I assume that the THE DESCRIPTIVE PHASE 165 subcommittee on organization would next submit would provide for a subcommittee on each prin- cipal phase of the activities of Frenchmen visible at the accession of Louis XVI. This list of sub- committees would necessarily represent a hypothe- sis about the number and nature of the dis- tinctive phases. It would be the working form of the organizing committee's hypothesis about the cardinal features of the facts to be reduced to a composite picture. In so far it would be an assumption about the conclusion before the evi- dence had been collected. If this assumption were adopted in such a way that it would in any degree predetermine the findings of the com- mittee of the whole as to the phases of the expe- rience which are to be considered as cardinal, it would by so much impair the value of the entire inquiry. The fact that numerous subcommittees were charged with investigation each of a differ- ent phase of activities supposed to be of cardinal importance in the given situation, would best insure against this sort of error. Each sub- committee would find that the phase of the experience with which it was primarily concerned was affected by other phases, and between them they would be able to amend the schedule as the work proceeded, by increasing or reducing the number of factors to be regarded as principal. l66 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE Still further, the work of each of these subcommittees would in part overlap and dupli- cate that of the subcommittee on general bibli- ography. All of the secondary writers would have depended, in one degree or another, upon the particular kinds of evidence that would be uncovered in greater abundance by the more in- tensive work on the special subjects. The over- lapping and duplication would be more of a gain than a loss, however, not chiefly because they would be checks upon oversights, but because they would be positive exhibits of the interconnec- tions of the same facts. The different commit- tees would come upon the same evidence from different angles of approach, or upon evidence having important bearings upon other subjects than the one with which they were primarily dealing. The duplications would stimulate in- spection of each kind of evidence in all the rela- tions in which it had a value. To take an illustration from a parallel case: In working on a problem in the theory of finan- cial administration in Germany in the seventeenth century, I casually turned up evidence that would be worth considering not only in each of the main divisions of social science as ordinarily understood, but in the history of language, of theology, of education, of several physical sci- THE DESCRIPTIVE PHASE 167 ences, and particularly of the practice of medi- cine. In each instance the sort of evidence which I happened upon while looking for something else might modify historical conclusions about the subject in which the evidence primarily belonged. Yet these particular items might long escape the attention of men who were searching directly for them in more expected connections. It is safe to assume further that a subcom- mittee would be formed on the physical condi- tions in France at the date selected, and on the use which Frenchmen were making of their physical surroundings. What were the physical means of the French, in terms both of the natural endowment of the country and of the known technique for exploiting nature? What scope was there for Frenchmen to get a living? The inquiry would naturally range from the scrappy sort of evidence in Arthur Young's Travels to scientific and official surveys of the resources of the country. There would of course be another subcom- mittee on the property relations, and their bear- ings upon the living which Frenchmen actually did get. Here would be lawyers' work; but the problem would be not only what laws were on paper, but whether the laws on paper were in force, and how the laws in force compared l68 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE with the laws in writing. Moreover, this com- mittee would have to find out what customs not written were stronger than laws that were written, and in just what ways these coercive customs molded the people. It would have to find out what differences there were in the shares of Frenchmen in the gross output of material goods ; whether these shares corresponded with the respective services of Frenchmen to one another; and if not, why not. There would have to be another subcommit- tee on the public law relations of the time, their variations between theory and practice, and their bearings upon the private life of citizens. Another subcommittee would deal with the people in their ecclesiastical relations. The church historians would have to take the lead here, and they would have an excellent oppor- tunity to illustrate the ever-present fact that things are not necessarily what they are labeled. To what extent was the church life of the French at this time a medium of religious expression, and to what extent was it other things, for instance a subtle medium by which some classes controlled other classes? There ought to be another subcommittee on the state of knowledge and opinion in France. What were Frenchmen thinking about, and what THE DESCRIPTIVE PHASE 169 were they thinking about it? To what extent were they thinking about the same things, and to what extent were they thinking the same thoughts about those things? To what extent did thinking about different things, or thinking different thoughts about the same things, divide Frenchmen into groups pursuing different inter- ests, and what relations did these thought-group- ings have with the groupings formed in other ways? This last question illustrates one of the occasions which these subcommittees would incessantly have for comparing notes, and for revising judgments as to others' findings. There should be a subcommittee on the aes- thetic life of the people. It should investigate not merely the status of the fine arts as usually under- stood. It should try to find out to what extent, and in what quantities and stratifications, artistic expression Avas a part of the life of Frenchmen when Louis the Stupid took the place of Louis the Sensual. It should record not only the cathedrals and the palaces which they built, and the pictures they painted, and the statues they carved, and the songs they sung. It should have attention for the songs which they did not sing, where life is desolate without song. It should find out who amused himself, and who slaved that the other lyo THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE might be amused. It should search out the scale of the distribution of enjoyment in the aesthetic sense, and it should stand ready to fit these facts into their share of prominence in the total situation. There should be a subcommittee on the struggles for power at the moment. What men were planning to change their position in the social scale, and why? What interests were impelling these men? Did the prominent indi- viduals represent themselves alone, or were they thrust forward by groups who used them as battering-rams or as scapegoats, or were they blends of the two characters? Did they see opportunities to promote their own private ambi- tions by serving as tools for many incapable of wielding their own tools? There should be a subcommittee on the moral codes of Frenchmen in those later days of the Bourbons. What did Frenchmen think wrong and right? What was their standard of wrong and right? Was it an individual or a social standard? Was it a standard of worth or of enjoyment? Was it one standard for all or a sliding scale? What sanctions had it? What were its actual bearings upon the life led by Frenchmen at the time? There should be a subcommittee on the rela- THE DESCRIPTIVE PHASE 1 71 tions between Frenchmen and other Europeans of the period. ^ To what extent was the Hfe of Frenchmen at this time their own life, and to what extent a Hfe forced upon them by their neighbors ? To what extent was it a reaction of their attempts to force a life upon their neigh- bors ? I do not know enough about Frenchmen of this period to know how many more subjects should be assigned to as many subcommittees. For the purpose of this illustration it is not necessary that I should know. I have said enough to carry my point. The committee of the whole which had divided itself into so many subcommittees would soon be in full cry after aspects of the life of Frenchmen which had escaped their preliminary survey. I was in the generation of college students that saw the transition from the textbook to the laboratory method in science. I used to see experiments in chemistry in which chemical processes were demonstrated. In physics I never saw an experiment that proved anything. The college possessed a small junkshop of physical apparatus which was never in order. All the good we ever got out of it was an unbroken series of exhibitions that those contrivances 172 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE could not be made to work as the theory said they should. We have not passed out of the stage of social science in which there is a similar contrast between theory and actual human experience. From Herodotus down a few men have been able to give literary renderings of men's actions which made more or less effective appeals to other men's imaginations. During the last hun- dred years men have put more and more effort into the work of composing versions of human experience which should literally correspond with reality. I do not deny that they have suc- ceeded in some degree, and on the other hand it would be entirely unreasonable to suppose that human experience could ever be measured as accurately as physical phenomena. Scholars know, however, that it is well within the range of men's ability to understand human experi- ence, both in detail and in the large, much more precisely and comprehensively than it has ever been interpreted thus far. One indispensable condition of this advance is willingness to apply the necessary amount of mental force. I think I have sufficiently indicated that the relatively simple descriptive stages of inquiry into a social situation are far beyond the capacities of one individual or of a few individuals. If the de- THE DESCRIPTIVE PHASE 173 scription is to be as thorough, for instance, as the preparation of an important case for trial in court — and surely this is not an excessive de- mand in the name of science — it must enlist the energies of many individuals. I was in London at the time of the final hearing of the Alaska boundary claims. The facts involved did not present a thousandth part of the complexity of the facts in the experience of Frenchmen during the forty years taken for our illustration. I do not know how many people were employed first and last in working up the Alaska case. I remember that I happened to be in the courtyard of the Hotel Cecil when the evidence was carted up to the entrance of the rooms where the commission w^as to sit. The amount of this material which I saw filled two large vans. I do not know how much more there was. Yet this evidence covered merely the different aspects of the relatively trivial and simple matter of locating a boundary line in mostly uninhabited country. What idea should we form of the comparative bulk and compara- tive complexity of the evidence that would be necessary for drawing all the lines of relation- ship in an authentic picture of all the inhabitants of France on the eve of the Revolution? Before leaving the preliminaries leading up 174 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE to a description of the experience we have used for our illustration, I must remark that our committee of the whole has so far planned only one thin section, so to speak, out of the several strata of description which evidently must be drawn over and into one another in order to cover even this brief period of forty-one years. The fact that men's experience is an incessant evolution of human values is in evidence in this case after the most superficial inspection. We speak of Frenchmen of the period as though they were relatively as constant as the Rhine or the Alps at the same period. In reality the whole meaning of the period is to be traced in the inconstancy of the French during these years. In the first place members of three generations were on the stage of action during this time. Some men who helped to drag him to the guil- lotine were not born when Louis XVI was crowned; and the sons of some of these fought under Napoleon on the day of his final disaster. In the second place, these mere comings and goings of the generations are by no means the surest signs of the systole and diastole of the evolutionary process, of the sinkings and risings of personal qualities and social morale in which human values are transmuted. How many sit- tings must the camera of history demand of the THE DESCRIPTIVE PHASE 175 Frenchmen of these four decades in order to get all the negatives which must be merged into the composite photograph? If our committee is at last able to describe Frenchmen of the first year of the period, is it certain that the picture corre- sponds with actual Frenchmen every year down to the meeting of the States General? If so, how soon was the transformation so great that another picture would be required for identifica- tion? Did a couple of months or a couple of eras separate that fifth of May from that four- teenth of July, and can our committee consider its labors closed with a description of the French at either date? Would Lafayette at that stage have recognized as the features of his country- men a truthful picture of Frenchmen as they were to be in that arrogant ''Year One'' of the French Republic? If he could have credited that picture, could his credulity have been stretched to accept the picture of the fourth month of that year, with Frenchmen changed to regicides ? Even my ignorance of the period is not so naive that I suppose all Frenchmen changed their characters as often and as capriciously as the coteries that controlled in Paris. But how often and how thoroughly did Frenchmen change their individual and group equations, from the 176 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE Frenchmen who loathed the disease of Bour- bonism to the Frenchmen who welcomed the remedy of restored Bourbons? Our committee of the whole must find its answers to these questions, and of course it will not, as the terms of the questions might seem to imply, find that the answers coincide with the mere shif tings of political control. But what were the essential changes in Frenchmen, espe- cially during the second half of the period, after their public life had changed from panoramic to kaleidoscopic ? I have mapped out as much preliminary de- scriptive work for our committee of the whole as my time permits me to sketch, and in the next lecture we must pass to another aspect of the scientific process. In closing I want to make it clear that I am not engaged in a diversion of Utopian word-painting. I have not conjured up this illustration as a play of the imagination, as a parody of the literal process which scientists must perform. On the contrary, every indi- vidual who studies a past or present experience, or stands thoughtfully contemplating the paths opening in the future, has to encounter all these problems of relationship. He is bound to go as far as his individual powers permit toward per- forming this whole preliminary process along THE DESCRIPTIVE PHASE 177 with the later processes. The validity of all his conclusions, and the probable contribution of all his actions to the main work of promoting the evolution of human values, will depend on his success in guessing out an approximate balance of these relations. No individual can ever by his unaided powers accomplish much more than a sagacious guess. How obvious it is then that, in order to dis- charge their function of interpreting to all the experience of all, scholars must raise their work to its highest power by co-ordinating their labors so that they may as far as possible constitute means proportioned to the task! Sooner or later scholars will recognize the force of this reasoning. Some American university, and per- haps in no very distant future, will seize this opportunity. It will encourage its scholars in the social sciences to resolve themselves into a body of co-operating investigators such as I have sketched. The university which takes this step will at once leap into a position of leadership as unique as that which was occupied by Johns Hopkins University during the fifteen years im- mediately following its foundation. More than this, someone, perhaps Mr. Car- negie himself, will presently see that human in- terests create a demand for investigation of the 178 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE meaning of human experience on a scale for which we have no present provision. If the in- come of the Carnegie foundation were to be reserved entirely for research in physical science, and an equal endowment were dedicated to the support of such an institute of social science as I have hinted at, the second foundation would certainly not lag behind the first in justifying its existence by its services. It is due to the pro- vincialism of scholars themselves more than to any other cause that the need of organized in- vestigation in social science has not been recog- nized, and that the endowment for it has not been secured. I announce myself as a candidate for a prophet's fame to this extent : Some of my hear- ers will live to see co-operative research in social science on a scale which will amount to more progress in method and in the value of results than came with Niebuhr's processes of sifting fact from fancy in Roman tradition. If I can do nothing to hasten that event, I may at least put myself on record as having foreseen its approach. LECTURE VII THE ANALYTICAL PHASE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE In the first lecture I said that social science is the proxy of all men in finding out the mean- ing of life. Science is abortion until its function is complete in action. The final justification for more knowledge of the social process is more ability to carry on the process and to advance it to higher levels. Not in spite of this estimate, but because of it,\J^am giving nearly ten times more attention in these lectures to the preparatory stages of social science than to the stage of application. I do so deliberately. In my judgment scholars will do most for the ultimate efficiency of social science if, at present at any rate, they preserve as a rule at least as large a ratio as this between criticism of scientific method and attempts to put such methods as we have into social experimentTj I shall say more on this point in a later lec- ture. In the sixth lecture I attempted to show how much and how complicated work is involved merely in stating the facts of a brief passage in human experience. But, as though all this neces- sary description had been accomplished, scholars have talked very freely for over a century of 179 l8o THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE the *1aws of history." In the rough they usually mean by the expression formulations of the causal ancestry of everything that is, back to its absolute beginning. When you come to think of it, in connection with the schedule that I pre- sented in the last lecture of the different sorts of things which must be found out before we can even state accurately what occurred in a given case, to say nothing of the causes and effects of what occurred, how many passages do you suppose there are in human experience that have been looked into with anything approaching the thoroughness demanded? If they have not been examined at least as carefully as my illus- tration has presumed, and if facts enough have not been found in the case of each passage of experience to answer the kind of questions that I have proposed, how do we really know whether the causal ancestry of anything has been made out? Still more, how do we know general prin- ciples of cause and effect? If we are not sure just what occurred in one case, nor of precisely why it occurred, nor of the exact consequences of what occurred, it is the limit of four-flushing, if I may be allowed the expression, to assert that we know just what occurred, and why, and with what result, in the hundreds or thousands or millions of cases that would be required to THE ANALYTICAL PHASE l8l indicate a general law. The historians know this better than anyone else, and they have be- come more suspicious than anyone else — too sus- picious as I shall argue presently — about the whole notion of "laws" of human experience. In the case of a great many combinations of chemical elements we know what regularly occurs, because these combinations have actually been observed under identical conditions a great many times; and the consequences have been uniform for each combination. The statement of these consequences for a given combination of elements and conditions is a chemical law. We have accordingly a collection of chemical laws. They exactly sum up recorded experi- ences. As a result of similar observations and ex- periments we have physical laws; that is, for- mulas of the actions of masses of matter, or of mechanical forces, under defined conditions. These laws too are summaries of a great many repetitions of the same phenomena. Men have ascertained just what took place. They have expressed what occurred in each of those cases in a statement which is as true for each as for any single one. Now are you sure that social occurrences have ever been analyzed so thoroughly that we l82 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE have the means of knowing just what took place in a single passage of human experience? If you think we have some instances of such pre- cise knowledge, are you sure that we have also such precise knowledge of the conditions under which a given passage of social experience oc- curred that we may pronounce it identical with the conditions under which another passage of experience occurred and accordingly may state each and all in a form analogous with a chemi- cal equation? Well, if you think we have such similar specimens of human experience, how many of them do you think it would take to make up a "law" of human experience, and do you think we have that many? For instance, many people have tried to study out a general theory of the causes of revolu- tions. In how many distinct cases do you sup- pose the exact causes of a single revolution have been determined beyond a reasonable doubt ? We have somewhat elaborate treatises on numerous revolutions, from the Semitic revolt in Egypt down to the socialistic riots in Spain. Are you sure that we know the precise combinations of forces that produced a single one of them? One of my colleagues in the history depart- ment told me the other day that he was getting more and more skeptical as to whether we have THE ANALYTICAL PHASE 183 the correct clue to the revolt of the colonies against Great Britain. Yet we have been given to understand from childhood that the reasons for that affair were known beyond all doubt! Again the precise collision of forces which culminated in the war between the states is still a matter of debate. We say "slavery" ; we say "state sovereignty"; we say "the" tariff." Un- questionably men clashed because their purposes ran counter to one another with reference to these subjects; but there were millions of men in both sections who had much more intimate con- cerns than any share they had in all these three questions put together. Is it very plausible, when we stop to consider it, that such remote matters as slavery, and the tariff, and state sovereignty accounted in any precise way for the actions of the great numbers of men who left their fami- lies and their shops and their professions, and voluntarily faced hardships and hunger and death instead of pursuing the even tenor of their way? Are not these generalizations rather obvious covers for evasion of the problem? Would it not be truer to say something like this : The resultants of Americans' actions on such disputed questions as federal versus state authority, the fixing of tariffs, the holding of slaves, and many less conspicuous matters, took such directions l84 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE that extraordinary emotions were stimulated in people who had relatively tenuous relations to these interests. Many men thought, felt, and willed in unusual ways ; their previous habits and institutions ceased to be sufficient to control their actions within the customary peaceful bounds; they found no means of adjusting these clashing impulses except force; but the precise process of this general mental derangement and the selec- tion of means for reorganizing it are more than we have been able to make out. Would not this really be making a clean breast of the superfi- ciality of our ostensible explanation? Do you think we have such an accurate explanation of the conflict of impulses in American minds before the Civil War that we could take this knowledge to Spain or to Turkey or to Russia or to China and compare it with someone's knowledge of the influences working there, and as a result of the comparison could say with authority, You will or you will not have a civil war? If you do, I do not share your belief. But incredulity on this matter has gone much farther than mine. It has set a fashion, first of all among historians themselves, especially in the last gen- eration, of adopting a tone of superiority to the whole notion of historical laws. I have heard historians publicly deny that there is any way THE ANALYTICAL PHASE 185 of explaining historical occurrences. It seems to me that the one extreme is quite as premature as the other. We cannot explain experience, and we always must explain experience. Having said so much in the sixth lecture about the first step in preparation for the neces- sary work of describing the facts within a given area of experience, and having now hinted at the problems of explanation necessarily following hard upon the descriptive phase of social science, I must go back a step for a few general reflec- tions upon this historical process. If you put together the titles of the four lectures of which this is the second, you will have the chief methodological divisions of the process of science, and particularly of social science as a whole. I have assigned a lecture to each division, or to speak more precisely to each chief phase of the scientific process. I have called these the descriptive, the analytical, the evaluative, and the constructive phases. I need hardly remark that a reduction of all the phases of social science to four calls for the qualification that each of these phases is inde- scribably complex. In fact, starting with the simplest act of attention and following on grade by grade till knowledge reaches the most general l86 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE form of science, each of these phases not only passes through ascending degrees of complexity, but at the same time each phase must be inces- santly connected with each other phase, while all are passing through progressing stages of complexity. In general these four phases of science are primarily concerned : first, the descrip- tive, with the facts; second, the analytic, with the connections of facts; third, the evaluative, with the worth of the facts; fourth, the con- structive, with control of the facts. The first two of these phases are historical in their perspective. The first sets in order past situations. This is the case even when we are dealing with situa- tions which we call present; for to our minds everything even of the day and hour has to be reckoned as past when we describe it, although as I have to observe in a moment there is another sense in which we treat even the remotest past as present. If this descriptive phase of science occurred in isolation, as any verbal representation seems to imply, its function would consist in dis- playing facts as such, then other facts as such, at most representing them as existing side by side but not allowing any relation of cause and effect to appear. In other words, the descrip- tive phase would be photographic, not rational. THE ANALYTICAL PHASE 187 For instance, if the experience to be described were the American Revolution, the description would be panoramic solely, depicting the proces- sion of all the events which could be sketched by portray ers or surveyed by onlookers without introducing any explanation whatever. We make use of this phase of knowledge in one of the most primary forms in the stories of adventure, in the lives of heroes, in the accounts of battles, and of other spectacular occurrences with which we introduce children to history. But in a different way the most critical history at- tempts to make this phase of science a distinct division of its procedure, if not indeed its whole procedure. From Niebuhr until now in Germany, with Ranke as the busiest preceptor, the most constant refrain among the historians has been the motto, or the commandment, "What was, as it was" (Was war, wie es war). You do not need me to tell you that this separation of what was as it was from why it was has never been and never can be strictly preserved. Indeed I have never been able to tell how strictly the German historians themselves distinguished even in ideal the "as-it-was" from why it was. Mommsen probably succeeded as nearly as anybody. He ventured the fewest pos- sible suppositions about causes in addition to his 1 88 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE literal narration of facts. This is the reason why he is a historian's historian, while by contrast Ferrero today is the general public's historian. Mommsen writes only what he knows, Ferrero would have little reason to write at all if he wrote only what he knew in addition to what other historians already knew. He gets a voca- tion by costuming his conjectures on the stage of the previously ascertained. Yet it is utterly impossible to separate the facts of history from real or imagined reasons to account for them. We have never respected the privacy even of the Sphinx and the pyramids. We have always been been prying into their story. We may say of our mind as the old rule-of- thumb physics said of nature: It abhors a vacuum. We cannot tolerate even Sphinx or pyramid isolated from the process that produced it. If no actual medium of occurrences pre- sents itself as the setting of Sphinx or pyramid, our minds inevitably construct a hypothetical background. We cannot tell of Patrick Henry uttering his melodramatic "Give me liberty or give me death" without supplying the episode with a scene and a plot which are really our explanation of the cause of the occurrence. Moreover, when we explain the occurrence we inevitably in a way take it out of past time, THE ANALYTICAL PHASE 189 through the process of setting a value on it in the shape of a judgment of the fitness or the un- fitness of the means chosen to the end in view, and then of generalizing this judgment as a tool for dealing with similar situations likely to occur in future experience. That is, all the main phases of scientific procedure are involved in some lesser degree in any description, just as an act of atten- tion is at the same time an act of feeling and volition. The same is true in turn of the other phases. Analysis of the causes of the actions of the American colonies from 1774 or 1789 impHes and involves not only previous description of their actions, but also some valuation of them as political wisdom or unwisdom, and some con- sideration of them as possible patterns for future actions or as danger signals indicating actions to be avoided. Most important of all for the final uses of science, the constructive application of knowl- edge gets its entire sanction, so far as it can be sanctioned in advance, from the validity of the previous descriptive, analytical, and evaluative stages of knowledge. To the degree in which these elementary processes are assumed without having been exhaustively performed, the con- IQO THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE structive programs which presuppose them are gambHngs with fate. As I intimated when speaking of the senti- mental sociologists in an earlier lecture, the pres- ent form of sociological theory is an evolution through a stage of homely social science which made attempts to construct, without adequate previous attempts to understand the forces to be controlled in the construction. I have thus been obliged both to turn back on my tracks and at the same time to get ahead of my story. This is because of the perverse fact that these knowledge processes do not fol- low one another in a straight line like the days of the week. They are more like the shuttles in a loom. All of them have to be in mind at once if we are to understand what is going on; yet we have to get acquainted with them by speak- ing of them as though they existed separately and consecutively. These reflections should help us now in re- turning to the paradox, We cannot explain experience, and we always must explain experi- ence. What meaning can we put into the paradox? To begin with we probably have here, as is usually the case with such contradictions, a mis- taken identity of ideas covered by the same THE ANALYTICAL PHASE 191 words. Are the believers and the disbelievers in historical laws talking about the same thing when they accept and reject the notion ^'explain"? I think not. Do we or do we not ^'explain" a Frenchman's challenge to a duel when we state that another Frenchman has called him a liar? Do we or do we not "explain" England's laying down two battleships by discovering that just previously Germany had laid down one ? If we mean by "explain" a discovering of relations which would act automatically in the same way among other men, we certainly can- not explain. We may infer rather confidently from our previous knowledge of Frenchmen what one of them of a certain social class will do if he is called a liar. From previous knowledge of Chinamen and Americans of a corresponding social grade we know that in their case the same provocation would be followed by different action. We know enough about Englishmen to be tolerably well assured that if the Germans lay down one battleship the English will lay down two; but at the same time we are equally safe in concluding that if Sweden or Norway or Russia should lay down two battleships under present circumstances neither Spain nor Italy nor 192 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE the United States would for that reason lay down even one. That is, we find that certain men act in cer- tain ways under the influence of certain stimuli. We may not be able to go very far toward find- ing out why these stimuli are followed by the action. We simply know the fact. We do not know why like stimuli in the case of other men produce unlike response. Again we simply know the fact. If we mean by explanation going back of the observed sequels of antece- dents to explain why those antecedents are fol- lowed by consequences, our ability may be very narrowly limited. On the other hand, if we mean by explanation assorting the variations of cir- cumstances in which men have been known to be placed, and the variations of activities which they have been known to perform under the stim- ulus of the circumstances, and then if we mean by explanation associating the particular actions of men whom we are studying with all the sur- rounding circumstances which can be ascertained, and, in so far as there is any known precedent for similar conduct under similar circumstances, inferring that the relation between antecedent and consequent was the same in the two cases, and that the same sequence will probably occur wherever there is the same reaction — if this is THE ANALYTICAL PHASE 193 what we mean by explanation, then it is alto- gether probable that men will go on to the end of time becoming more and more explicit in explaining experience. To approach a translation of my paradox, then, I resort to a plain commonplace, viz. : Men form valuations, and their conduct is always in the line of one or more valuations, or in a line pointed out by an accommodation of two or more valuations. Do not take this as merely a repetition of the formula of the fifth lecture: Men's experi- ence is the evolution of human values. We must distinguish between these twO' concepts "values" and "valuations." The one is objective, the other subjective. Physical prowess, habits of industry, capacity for self-government are human values. Estimates of such things, whether before or after the event, appraisals of their worth, are valua- tions. Values are the output of the human pro- cess in the shape of achievement organized into personality. Valuations are the power generators that keep the process of achievement in action. Relatively to the last term .in the social process which we can understand, valuations are causes; values are effects. For the benefit of scholars who might insist on a certain technical meaning of the term 194 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE "valuation," I must explain that I do not use it as a name merely for the conscious process of balancing evidence and arriving at a logical judgment. By "valuations" I mean all sorts of preferences of this for that. They may be con- genital. They may be reflexive. They may be sheer habit. They may be deliberate judgments. I am simply going back to the fact that men hold certain things as desirable, certain alterna- tive things as undesirable. I call each of these preferences a "valuation," whether the process of arriving at it was more or less intellectual in the strict sense. It is the psychologists' affair to go as far as they can, not merely toward making out the dif- ferences between the least conscious and the most conscious valuations, but also toward explain- ing how valuations pass from mere valuations into visible actions. For instance, a tribe holds a valuation of a stretch of land as its hunting- ground, i.e., as the source of its food supply. In this case the valuation of the hunting-ground is as the valuation of the food supply. In the ab- sence of counterbalancing valuations the tribe will resist encroachment upon this hunting- ground. In another age many men form valua- tions of an anticipated condition after death as more desirable than any comfort in this life. THE ANALYTICAL PHASE 195 Their program accordingly becomes renuncia- tion now and hope of a more than compensating hereafter. In another age some men's valuations center upon money and the power that money brings. Thereupon for them everything is worth what it is worth as a money-getter. In each case we have abundant instances of the fact. We know less about the psychological process of the fact. Accordingly a second commonplace is not so universally accepted, namely : Human valuations produce all human conduct. If I am challenged to tell what the word ''pro- duce" means in this connection — and there is a certain propriety in the challenge — I frankly admit that I do not know. That is, I have no solution of the remoter problem implied in the challenge. Again I should go to the psycholo- gists to find out how much they have learned, and what the prospects are of learning more about the subjective process behind the objective sequence. As I use the term ''produce" here, however, it has an essentially interrogative force, for the purpose of the inquiry which the chal- lenge calls for, in the same sense in which the phrase "natural selection" is virtually interroga- tive in a formula of evolution. I explained this sense in the fifth lecture. For instance, I reach 196 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE the valuation of a certain otherwise meaningless gesture as serviceable for my present purpose. Having this valuation, I use the gesture. I do not fully know the process which intervenes in my consciousness between my arrival at the valuation of the gesture and my use of it; but I know that my valuation came before the ges- ture, and that the gesture would be unthinkable without the valuation. I do not use the word ''produce" as a substitute for knowledge which I do not have of the process between the valuation and the gesture. I use it for the knowledge which I do have, viz., that, in the absence of strong inhibition in the form either of force or of counterbalancing valuations, the gesture will im- mediately follow the valuation that it will be serviceable. That is, we cannot give an exhaustive psy- chological or metaphysical explanation of why there was a servile revolt at Rome and no servile revolt in our southern states. We do know that wherever a population consists of part privileged part unprivileged there are valuations of that arrangement on both sides of it, and these valua- tions make for corresponding actions. What- ever happens, we are justified in keeping our eye on the fact of men's appraisal of privilege and THE ANALYTICAL PHASE 197 unprivilege as one of the clues, at any rate, to subsequent events. We do not know why some men will sell their souls for money and why there is not money enough in the world to buy some other men. Mysterious as either extreme is, it leaves us with the general knowledge that estimates of the value of money are among the variants of men's actions. If two men or two groups of men differ about money, we may safely infer that some part of their subsequent conduct toward each other has its impulse in the estimate at which money is held in their scale of goods. If one group of men has religious beliefs which usually express themselves in certain types of conduct, and another group has beliefs which go along with other types of conduct, we may not be able to pry beyond the existence of these habits, but it would not be worth while to doubt that if these groups have to live together the respective valuations of the peculiar habits will register themselves in corresponding actions and reactions between the groups. Now it is the veriest platitude among all who have given the slightest thought to human experi- ence that men who may be of help to one another in gaining ends settle in groups accordingly. Nobody had thought that this fact would repay 198 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE very close study till the sociologists took it up. It grew on the sociologists, however, that this phenomenon — the formation of functional groups or valuation groups — deserved much more atten- tion than it had received. When the sociologists win their case, as they will some time unless men stop thinking, it will be another instance of the stone which the builders refused becoming the head of the corner. If the plan of these lectures permitted me to go into such minutiae, this would be the point where I should have to show how the problems of explanation or analysis presented by partial description of human experience led to general sociology, and then to social psychology. If I were speaking to sociologists or psycholo- gists particularly, I should have to explain what I understand by this subdivision. For the sake of simplicity I ignore the subdivision and use only the term sociology. We may know individual valuations and group valuations in the same sense in which we know specific gravity. It does not seem probable that we shall ever be able to measure individual or group valuations as accurately as we can measure the specific gravity of physical bodies. Professor Giddings is working on a "social mark- ing system," and he has developed an apparatus for making some of our measurements of valua- THE ANALYTICAL PHASE 199 tions more precise than they have been. It is not too much to expect that more progress is to be made in this direction. Whatever approaches we may make in the future, however, to adequate standards of social weights and measures, it will of course always be true that human valuations are less constant than specific gravity. In the first place, enemies of today are allies tomorrow. Groups that have been militant in their valua- tions adopt industrial valuations just as indi- viduals as they grow older change their leading valuations from sport to business, and to politics, and to art, and again to other sport, etc. In the second place, as Professor James says, men "energize" differently. In this respect there are contrasts both between persons and persons and between the same person at different times. Ratzenhofer's scale of these energizings was : positive moderate; comparative radical; super- lative irreconcilable. That is, one of our cal- culations always has to do with the ratio in a given case of those whose energizing is ex- hausted by an academic statement of their valua- tion, those who will work for it, and those who will go to the last ditch for it. The phenomena of panics, of political elections, of religious revivals, with the corresponding reactions. 200 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE readily come to mind as illustrations of the fluc- tuating force of valuations. Discounting then all these elements of in- exactness, we still have the most searching clue to analysis and explanation of human experi- ence in ascertainable valuations and their modes of action. We need have no fear, by the way, that the use of this clue will entangle us with the old dialectical puzzle : Does action always fol- low the strongest motive ? That is a quite differ- ent problem. The chief sociological contribution to the methodology of social science consists, in a word, in emphasizing the implications of the ^ fact that human valuations are the efficient social forces. These implications may be summed up in a simple proposition: To explain human ex- perience it is necessary to know human valua- tions and their workings. For lifting this perception above the threshold of consciousness social science owes more to the author of Dynamic Sociology than to any other man. I express this judgment in spite of the fact that in my opinion Professor Ward's elabora- tion of the thesis, psychic forces are the true causes of all social phenomena, makes the actual human process much simpler than it really is. Just as the Kantian ethics makes virtue a func- tion of impossibly abstracted will, so Ward's THE ANALYTICAL PHASE 20l sociology makes the social process a function of impossibly abstracted cognition.^ This slurs over the processes of attention and valuation too much, not only from the psychological stand- point, but from the sociological as well. These are details, however, which need not confuse us in making a preliminary survey of the analytical phase of social science. If I correctly apprehend what men have meant as a rule when they have talked either pro or con about the ''laws" of history, the notion has usually been of a way of making out an unbroken causal series by which, for instance, a given act of Congress in the year 1910 may be referred back, step by step from nearer effects to remoter causes, until it begins in some initial cause in Witanagemot or Roman Senate or Amphictionic Council. Even if we believe that there is such a relationship between the present and the past — and I am unable to understand how anyone who professes to hold the evolutionary rather than the creationary conception of experience can suppose anything else — it would be an exceptionally credu- lous person who could imagine that we might * I am aware that this proposition seems to contradict Ward's theses in terms of feeling. I nevertheless believe that my objection is valid. 202 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE ever in a single instance identify the steps in such a succession. If by explaining human experi- ence such a superhuman piece of detective work is meant, I am acquainted with no one who would contend for the possibility. A proposed ''law of history" hypothecated upon alleged knowledge of such a sequence would be less plausible, if anything could be, than those genealogies which people with more money than sense of historic probability pay fakirs to trace back to the Con- queror or to Charlemagne. Such a conception of explaining experience is like asking a biolo- gist to prove that there has been a process of the differentiation of species by tracing back the chemical elements of which his own body is composed through all their mutations to the spot and the state in which they existed when animal life first appeared. But there is a quite different conception of explaining experience. It does not contemplate reconstruction of the items of the life of men from first to last. Its aim is to make out the process of social life, whatever be the particular passage of experience to be explained. In this it is attempting something analogous with the attempt of the physiologist to determine exactly what is going on at a given time in a living organism, whether it is normal or pathological. THE ANALYTICAL PHASE 203 The physiologist does not try to find out the cosmic record of each atom in that aggregate of material previous to its entrance into the organ- ism. He tries to find out what the tissues are now doing as parts of the organism. In the lowest terms that I can find for it without going beyond my depth in psychology, the social process is this: forming valuations; seeking means to realize valuations; in the seek- ing, whether successful or not, modifying the valuations; again seeking means to realize the changed valuations ; and so on beyond any limit that we can imagine. In other words, considered on its process side human experience is an in- creasingly involved rhythm of choosing ends and choosing means to attain them, the choosers being themselves more or less reconstructed in the process. Thereupon the problem of explaining human experience in general, or a select passage of it, may be reduced to a pattern question that in form is simple enough : What was the body of valua- tions held by the men concerned, and what was the scheme of means on which they relied to realize the valuations? That is, our clue to the universal process of the evolution of human values is that the ele- ments of the process are everywhere generically 204 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE the same. They are always on the one hand men's valuations of things worth doing, and on the other hand men's devices for doing the things. Each of these two elements is functionally of one pattern. Each is merely more complex in ap- paratus in the British empire for instance than in a Bushman's village. If you feel moved to criticize to the effect that what I have been saying bears not the faint- est trace of novelty; that poets and philosophers from Homer and Plato down have rung the changes on it in countless more attractive ways; that hundreds of American school boys repeat it, and thousands hear it at every graduation season in some variation of the theme *'Ideas make the world" — if you think this rejoinder states facts, I shall enter no denial. You are right but you are not pertinent. If all the barren common- places abroad in the world should suddenly get the attention they deserve, I know not how many generations of human evolution would be re- quired before men's ideals could so nearly catch up with reality that they could see any room for further improvement. If all our commonplaces were worked to their limit, they would amount to all the heaven we could understand. It is true; the only original thing about the sociologists* statement of this commonplace is that the sociolo- THE ANALYTICAL PHASE 205 gists seriously propose to follow it up and to find out how efficient a guide it is to explanation of experience. The chief source of all human woes, in our age at least, is that we do not live up to our commonplaces. This is almost as true in science as it is in morals. It is conspicuously true in this instance. Instead of making a ven- ture in mysticism, as has been pretty generally supposed, the sociologists have been literal enough to take the commonplace at its word and to resolve that they will get all the instruc- tion possible from its guidance. The sociolo- gists have assented to everybody's knowledge. "Yes, people do form valuations," say the soci- ologists; "they do grope after means to realize them; they do arrange themselves in groups in the course of this groping; they do make their groups tools in the service of their valuations; and this is the process that we discover when- ever we cast our eyes abroad upon men, whether the nature peoples or our neighbors. Go to, now! We will take knowledge of these valua- tions and these f unctionings ; we will do it by system; we will do it from one end of the scale of the process to the other; and in this knowl- edge of groups valuing, and groups functioning in the line of their valuations, and thus trans- forming themselves through striving to realize 2o6 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE their valuations, we will get more insight than has ever before been gained into the meaning of human experience." A few years ago the head of the department of economics in one of our largest universities volunteered the remark to me : "In my opinion, Professor Thomas has staked out the richest pay-dirt at present under claim anywhere in social science." I was so delighted at this symp- tom that I took no risk of interrupting the progress of ideas by venturing any leading ques- tions. As Professor Thomas' Source Book of Social Origins has since made plain, however, he has simply been working out a more penetrating method than had been used before for getting a concrete content and form for an idea which had been a rather vacant generality. Many less specific analyses, like Professor Eucken's Ruling Ideas of Ancient Times or the Duke of Argyle's Unseen Foundations of Society, have been al- most within striking distance of the same method. Herbert Spencer's rather unfortunately misno- mered Principles of Sociology had improved the method. In its aim more than its technique Pro- fessor Sumner's Folkways was an application of the same idea which Professor Thomas is de- veloping. But Sumner and Thomas have merely furnished early samples of the sort of social THE ANALYTICAL PHASE 207 analysis which was foreshadowed by Comte's prospectus of sociology. General sociology is first of all the elaboration of categories as tools for such analysis, and then it is a beginning of the use of these tools for purposes of social explanation. In the sixth lecture I supposed, for the sake of illustration, that a body of scholars from all the departments of social science had so far recognized the force of the argument here out- lined as to form themselves into an institute for co-operative investigation of human experience. I did not raise the question at all what work they might best undertake, because that would have carried me away from the treatment of prin- ciples to a specific application of the principles; and about this opinions might greatly differ. As my subject was the descriptive phase of social science, I further supposed for the sake of more definite illustration that the experience chosen for description was that of Frenchmen during the forty years following the accession of Louis XVI. I have been told meanwhile that I was understood to imply that it would make no difference what passage of experience such an institute chose to investigate; that one would be as important as another; or else that in my opinion the French Revolution was the most 2o8 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE important portion of human experience for scholars to study. I take this opportunity to cor- rect that impression. It would be utter and inexcusable waste of opportunity for such an in- stitute to put its force upon some parts of human experience. On the other hand, there may be a great many reasons why such an institute would not be making the best use of its strength even if it chose to study such an intensely instruct- ive period as that of the French Revolution. I hope this statement will make it clear that when I am using purely hypothetical illustrations I am not laying down rules of procedure. I feel bound under the circumstances to repeat the same precautionary statement in connection with the illustration which follows. It may be conceivable to some minds that our institute of social science might devote its earliest years to the perfecting of the sociological categories of description. I do not mean to imply anything one way or another about the wisdom of such a decision. Without asking you to overtax your imagination by assuming such a choice on the part of the institute, I merely say that progress in explaining human experience will very nearly keep step with progress in making out valua- tion groups in their ascending orders of com- plexity and the functionings which take place THE ANALYTICAL PHASE 209 in and between those groups, as their valuations and their machineries for realizing them assume varied characters. Someone must do the work of analyzing human situation after situation in terms of valuations and of energizings in pur- suance of the valuations ; otherwise social science will come to a halt at the point where its chief efficiency should begin. It is in this connection that pioneerings such as those of Sumner and Thomas are signifi- cant. They have relations to social science as a whole closely resembling those of Professor Loeb's studies of micro-organisms to human physiology. The folk psychology of the nature peoples is merely the child psychology of the race. It is study of the universal processes of evaluating and energizing in the most rudi- mentary forms in which they may be found. This rudimentary knowledge is our initial guide in analyzing the maturest forms of the same pro- cesses which we anywhere encounter. But there are ascending orders of complexity in group psychology, just as there are in the zoological series. We have the task therefore of analyzing the successive species of social types from the least complex to the most complex. The reason is not merely that we can learn in this way only the actual processes of the high- 2IO THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE est present social group, but also that the inter- mediate types recur within the great societies of our own civilization. Preparation for research in social science is therefore in a sense analogous with prepara- tion for the practice of medicine. At one stage the sort of experience necessary is comparable with the study of elementary biology. At another stage description of relatively simple ancient groups is in order, which may be com- pared with dissection of the cadaver. Still later one is able to profit by analysis of social experi- ence in recent times in situations quite closely resembling those of the present. This may be likened to attending a clinic. Then comes the actual learning by joining in current affairs, which is like the work of an interne. Latest of all and analogous with medical practice itself, there may be responsible attempts to control the conditions of social health and disease. That is, our conception of social explanation does not make it like attempting to account for the last child born in terms of all his progeni- tors back to primordial protoplasm. We think of it rather as like trying to express the child in terms of all that we have learned about physi- ological processes in general — the organizing of cells into tissues, and tissues into organs, and THE ANALYTICAL PHASE 2li organs into functions, and functions into growth, and growth into power. Thus the men who are beginning to get a *'body" for sociology, as Pro- fessor Ross expresses it, are really furnishing sample analyses of selected social groups; and similar and more complex analyses must be made of every social group so far as we undertake to explain its experience at all. How rapidly it will be possible to make such attempts convin- cing no one can foresee. Noteworthy efforts at such explanation are the studies of Mr. Louis Wallis on the experience of the Hebrew nation, published in the fourteenth volume of the Ameri- can Journal of Sociology under the title, *'Bib- Hcal Sociology"; a study of a typical modern situation by Professor Williams, reported in the American Journal of Sociology for May, 1910, under the title, ''Outline of a Theory of Social Motives." If one wants an incisive criticism of the process involved in arriving at such valua- tions, Dr. Arthur F. Bentley's book entitled The Process of Government should be read. In spite of the fact that the book laboriously misunder- stands all the sociologists, it would repay much m.ore attention than it has received. Anyone looking for a leading-string through the whole maze of sociological technicalities may find it in what I have said in this lecture, pro- 212 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE vided one is prepared to make the application, like the biologists and the electrical engineers we have seemed to the onlooker to have been more successful in producing vocabularies that called for the remaking of dictionaries than in really enlarging knowledge. In fact our work is not for the words but the words for the work. We have to differentiate terms of structure and function and process, to go along with our increasing insight into the differentiating phe- nomena of structure and function and process in men's experience. It may be that our present apparatus of concepts and words for them will look as insufficient to men a hundred years hence as eighteenth-century physical and physiological terms now look to us. Meanwhile this is the actual frontier of social science today : We have the clue that men valu- ing and combining their efforts in the line of their valuations are the elements of all social expe- rience. We have to learn how to recognize men's valuings and to state their actions in terms of them, from the most simple to the most involved. We have to learn all we can about the function- ings in the most primary human groups which we can trace, in which all the visible valuations may possibly be reduced to the food and sex wants; and we have to expand that knowledge THE ANALYTICAL PHASE 213 to correspond with each lengthening of the gamut of men's vahiations and devices. The phases of the scientific process to be dis- cussed in the next two lectures are so intimately interwoven with this analytic phase that I must anticipate something which will have to be re- peated, namely: All that we can do in the way of explaining past experience has its chief value in fitting us for description and analysis of the passing situation, and then for shaping scientific conclusions so that they will most effectively pass into promotion of the present human processes. While I am obliged to discuss these abstracted phases of science as though they had a detach- able existence and an independent and co-ordi- nate value, this is not the fact. Each of these phases is worth what it is worth as a means to the whole process of science; and science itself is worth merely what it is worth as a means to the end of completer human experience. Our whole scientific methodology must at last be adjusted to this outlook. Our knowledge pro- cesses must be organized with reference to the scale of values of things to be known. The standard of that scale will be the sort of knowl- edge demanded by the things to do. LECTURE VIII THE EVALUATING PHASE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE One of the darling dogmas of modern scien- tific purism is that in dealing with facts judg- ments of the values of the facts must be strangled. It would be hard to find a very clear case of strict obedience to the dogma, yet it stands high in the formal scientific code. Of course it is the opposite swing of the thought pendulum from the method of conscienceless homiletical im- pressment of snap judgments about facts into the service of opinion. One cannot draw accurate boundaries for such tendencies in a sentence, but it is within limits to say that this "edifying" way of treating supposed facts, to the prejudice of valid description and analy- sis, was the rule rather than the exception in the eighteenth century. The coming of criti- cism to its own in the nineteenth century might be described with some approach to fairness as an inversion of the order of prominence pre- viously assigned to description on the one hand and to evaluation on the other. The older method went so far that it permitted valuations to create their own facts. The reaction went so far that it invaded the right of facts to be evaluated. 214 THE EVALUATING PHASE 215 The historical criticism which by somewhat general consent is dated from Niebuhr is in prin- ciple a repudiation of previous prescriptive right of opinion to create its own evidence. This criti- cism did not at once go to the other extreme of excluding evaluation from the scientific process. It served notice that the evaluating process might no longer be allowed to settle the facts and their meanings in advance. It demanded the right of way for description and analysis. The facts and their connections having been determined, then the new criticism not merely admitted the right of evaluation but insisted upon the exercise of the right; otherwise there would have been no suffi- cient reason for the pursuit of knowledge at all. I presume that I have said enough in the last two lectures on the general principle that the four main phases of the scientific process which I have distinguished are all necessarily involved, in some form and degree, in every actual scientific process. I am now concerned therefore to indi- cate some of the important marks of this third phase of the process — not necessarily third in time, not necessarily third in rank in a given problem, but third in that order of precedence which we call "logical" when we attempt to repre- sent experience in words. '^When a human device loses any part of its 2l6 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE character as a tool, and takes on any of the character of a ritual, it begins to be tyrannical. Each increase in the ratio of the ritualistic to the functional in the use of the device threatens the genuineness of the process. If time allowed, I should be glad to present evidence in support ^ of the proposition that throughout social science we have permitted the descriptive and analytic phases of critical method to become ritualistic in their force to such an extent that they seriously prejudice the right of the evaluative and the con- structive phases of scienceT] In all departments of knowledge, and specifi- cally in those reaches of knowledge with which we are now dealing, men assume that their odors are those of superior sanctity when they declare, ''You have no business to have opinions about facts; all you have a right to is the facts them- selves, and there an end of it !" If we had time to amuse ourselves at the ex- pense of this pomposity, it would be easy to show that it is thoroughly "Pickwickian." Of course everybody with the rudiments of psychology knows that evaluation has its part in the earliest processes of attention, and is neces- sarily concerned in more and more complex forms in the successive stages of knowledge. The very judgment which expresses itself in the THE EVALUATING PHASE 217 form of a prohibition of evaluation is itself an evaluation ! To introduce the real problem in this connec- tion, then, I again resort to paradox, viz.. We may never put our valuations into the facts, and zve must always put our valuations into the facts. Now hov^ near can we get to the truth that is pointed at from opposite directions by this contradiction ? I had intended to analyze the two sides of this formal antithesis in detail. So much needs to be said about the substantial matter, however, that I have time merely to indicate the result at which analysis would arrive, namely : Our evalu- ations are always pertinent to the extent of their justification and use as hypotheses for explaining and applying the facts. Our evaluations are impertinent to the extent in which they embarrass criticism of the facts and of their functional rela- tions. I shall not return to this abstract statement in the rest of the lecture, but I shall try to bring out some of its practical consequences. To begin with, I would call attention to cer- tain educative values in study of human experi- ence earlier than that of living men. I am not saying that these are the only values. No opinions which may be held by others about 2l8 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE additional uses of such study are either accepted or rejected by implication in what I am now saying. If we had the training of all the future legis- lators, administrators, judges, and leaders of public opinion in our country completely under our control, we should all want them to study the past of the human race to some extent. Some of us would want to prescribe more of such study, some less. We should state our reasons for such study somewhat differently, but each of us would have one or more reasons that in our minds would be sufficient. The main reason which I would urge for such study, from the side of the human process in general, not from the standpoint of the individual, would be closely connected with my idea of the functional relation between the evaluative and the constructive phases of knowledge on the one hand, and the two phases already discussed on the other. It would be connected also with the idea which I outlined in the seventh lecture, of the analysis of process as contrasted with the tracing of chronological sequence. It would differ rather sharply with the common concep- tion of the sort of knowledge to be derived from history. In a word, I should rely upon academic study of the past less to yield inductions of the THE EVALUATING PHASE 219 common qualities of similar occurrences^ past and present, or of the causal relations between histori- cal events; I should expect it more to develop an eye for all the different kinds of factors involved in contempo7'ary social processes, and a keen sense of proportion to gauge the ratio of influence between the factors. For instance, it would seem to me very paltry, even if it were possible, to learn all the facts and even to analyze and proportionally estimate the different sorts of influences that led to the facts which come to our minds with the mention of Brutus and Charlotte Corday and J. Wilkes Booth and the rest of their series. We may as- sume for certain purposes that we have all the facts and that we have accounted for all the facts that preceded one or many of these trage- dies. When we attempt to put these facts and our analysis of them into one of the conventional specimens of historical generalization, the irrele- vance of the induction for all purposes of pre- cision is so obvious that the skepticism not only of trained historians but of intelligent laymen is unavoidable. When we say, Such and such conditions produce political assassination, we utter a generality not much more dependable than the generality that going to bed precedes the majority of deaths. 220 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE Presupposing the descriptive and analytical phases of our knowledge process, however, and putting the emphasis now on the evaluative phase in one of the cases referred to, such questions as these arise: The valuations or purposes of the society concerned being taken for granted, and the facts about the given situation being ade- quately described, how many kinds of action might have been useful in that situation toward accomplishing the purposes? Suppose we have some means of knowing that the valuations actually held by the society in question were mistaken, that they tended toward the marring rather than the making of the society; what alter- natives were within reach of the society for modi- fying the valuations? In either case, was this particular recourse of political assassination the most promising means in sight? What means would have been a better investment for the society ? I express no opinion about the grade of social education which would be represented by apply- ing the mind to such questions, nor about the proportion of such exercise which would be ad- visable in the course of education for social leadership. I simply say that a certain amount of this sort of inquiry would be profitable for THE EVALUATING PHASE 221 everyone who is to bear the part of an educated man in helping to solve problems of real life. But the attempt to answer one of these ques- tions is an attempt to arrive at an evaluation of the particular act under review. Notice I have asked no questions about the motives of the actor, about the merit or demerit of his act as a question of his individual virtue, about the praise or blame that should be meted out to him, about his respon- sibility or his irresponsibility for what he did. There is a scientific priggishness which is alto- gether too fussy about barring even these ques- tions. As hypothetical problems, assuming a formulation of the surrounding circumstances, they have a certain pedagogical use, in the same way to be sure that profitable hypothetical prob- lems in the theory of morals are presented by Hamlet, or Lear's daughters, or Othello. But I am not talking about this second type of question. I am making use of the fact that we treat passages of experience like those taken for illustration in a purely arbitrary way, if we are content to deal with them merely as effects. In these effects the causes which produced them continue their work. These remoter causes take these effects into partnership as cumulative or varying causes. Thus reinforced the antecedent causes enter anew into competition with the other 222 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE causes that are working for results in the same society. Now I am urging that it is profitable, as a part of our apprenticeship in knowledge, to practice evaluating the forces which were avail- able at different stages of experience, which men might have controlled in different ways, which might have been turned into causes of different effects. We thus have a means of learning how to foresee various possible effects, and to form valuations accordingly of alternative means be- tween which there is room for choice. In other words, there are two opposite ways of looking at past occurrences. The first way is to stand in front of them so to speak, to see them coming toward us, to make out the different forces that are impelling them, the share of each force in the impulsion, and to regard the occur- rences as so many resultants of all this previous interaction. That is well as far as it goes, but it is attention to only one aspect of the occur- rences. The other way is to put ourselves around be- hind an experience as it were, to look forward along the line of its action as a cause, and not only that, but to take account of the inhibited causes which might have been released for action instead of the one really employed, and to form valuations of the relative utility of the means THE EVALUATING PHASE 223 really chosen and those set aside — the actual pur- poses of the society concerned being taken as the criterion. I repeat that I am speaking of the academic values of these two attitudes of mind. The refer- ence is for the sake of illustrating what I mean by the evaluative phase of science in distinction from the other phases. I say it would be wasteful pedagogy to confine our views of occurrences to their relations as effects, and not to employ our minds also upon estimates of the comparative value of those occurrences, and others which were possible alternatives, considered as means for promoting the contemporary purposes of the given society. The illustration might perhaps be more vivid if stated in terms of a different sort of occurrence. Suppose the experience in hand is the Declara- tion of Independence, the Ordinance of Secession, or the Reconstruction Acts. In either case it is impossible for us to end our scientific treatment with the aspects of the process discussed in the last two lectures. No passage in human experi- ence is a closed incident. Every last act in the human drama is a curtain raiser for another first act. Suppose we have exhausted description and interpretation of either of these American experi- ences up to its realization as an effect. The 224 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE human process does not stop at such flag-stations of our minds. Science would deserve all the contempt which the least appreciative rule-of- thumb man aims at it, if science limited itself to the role of a dissector of dead deeds or a necrolo- gist of dead men. Science is at last a part of the dynamic and directorate of events. As ap- prenticeship for the sort of science which com- pletes itself in action, academic dealing with past human experiences would be pitifully ineffective if it stopped with consideration of men's acts as past and done. Even academically we may place ourselves in the position of the actors. We may look forward from their standpoint into their problems. We may take account of their re- sources. We may balance their appraisals of probabilities. We may agree or disagree with them in their evaluations of possible alternatives. This latter procedure, I say, is a profitable ele- ment in educational experience. Be this as it may, I have used the long illus- tration simply for the purpose of bringing out the difference between the descriptive and the analytical or explanatory phases of science on the one hand and the evaluative phase on the other. I have not raised the question of the amount of this evaluative procedure actually needed in our academic program. I have not intended to imply THE EVALUATING PHASE 225 that there is agreement either within or without academic circles about the pedagogical utility of this evaluative process when performed upon past situations. However the case may stand in these respects, my central interest at this -point is in bringing into view the distinctive traits of that aspect of science to which this lecture is devoted. Dropping the illustration altogether then, so far as it may seem to imply a return to pedagogi- cal considerations instead of continuing atten- tion to research, I would resume direct discussion first by stating as clearly as I can what I mean by "the evaluating phase of science" at this point. / mean the work of arriving at the completest ■ objective estimate possible of the qualitative and » quantitative effects which possible alternative • combinations of the forces to be controlled in a given situation zvould have upon the whole human; process. In other words, it is the supremest effort of which co-operative science is capable to make ascertained knowledge of cause and effect in human relations, rather than individual or par- tisan preferences about human relations, the standard of value by which to arrive at decisions of what ought to be in human programs. As I shall remark later, the use of such a criterion necessarily depends always upon provisional 226 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE evaluations of this as preferable to that through- out the whole range of supposable effects of alternative programs. In the second place I must call attention to the : fact that when this evaluative phase of science is foremost, whatever its subject-matter and what- \ ever its importance, its time-consciousness is set \ with reference to the present and the future in- i stead of the past. 4 I presume it would be possible to make an argument to the effect that no study of the past could do anything whatever toward qualifying anybody to evaluate forces to be controlled at ^present. It is conceivable that some men might : go to the extreme of believing that the daily business of life, the school of actual experiment with affairs, is the only educator that can make anyone in any degree competent to pass on the value of courses of action open, or which men , might be induced to open, at this moment. Patu- lous as l^hat idea seems to me to be, I will not contend against it. Let anyone assume if he will that all study of the past goes for nothing in equipping men to deal with problems of the day. The fact remains that when the world wakes up to each day's work, and in each minute of • its working hours, real life is a constant evalua- ■ tion of physical and human forces. Every man THE EVALUATING PHASE 227 who is dealing with reality is incessantly obliged, whether he will or no, to assume estimates of the relative values of different possible means with reference to the ends which he has in view. In so far then as there can be any science at all of human life considered as an enterprise, not as a reminiscence, this evaluative aspect of the science is central. In their aims, as formulated usually by their respective exponents, political science, political economy, and sociology are evaluative procedures of so many distinct kinds. Their outlook is pro- spective rather than retrospective. Each attempts ,to find out how to bring something to pass. In general, political science tries to find out the best methods of legal control; political economy, the best means of assuring material prosperity; soci- ology, the best means of promoting the develop- ment of human personality. In my judgment the institute of social sci- ence spoken of in earlier lectures would have little use for those academic categories after it had settled down to serious work; but I may take these familiar names for granted a moment for purposes of illustration. I am not about to say anything that is debatable. I need merely to emphasize something about which there is no controversy. It is so obvious that it is seldom 228 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE thought worthy of attention, namely: From MachiavelH to Mr. Bryce the poHtical scientists propose some variation of the one question, "How may government most successfully govern?" In proposing this question the political scientists evi- dently assume successful political control as an end, and their whole effort thereupon becomes a process of seeking and evaluating possible means to that end. The process rejects many conceiv- able means as less available for various reasons, and approves certain schemes of means as more likely to promote the end. The political economists do a parallel thing with their proposed end wealth, and the means by which it may be gained; and the sociologists another parallel thing with their proposed end human values, and the best means of achieving them. But is scientific evaluation complete on this level ? Are all [its] conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, Shrunk to this little measure? Is it one and the same thing whether the sort of government which MachiavelH had in mind achieves its ends, or the kind of government pro- posed by Mr. Bryce ? Is the getting of predatory wealth as high in the scale of ends as the get- THE EVALUATING PHASE 229 ting of social wealth? Does it make any differ- ence whether the ''human values" which we propose as our ends are the values of the mar- ket, or of the jockey club, or of the officers' mess, or of the academy, or of the cloister, or of neither? In other words, beyond evaluation with reference to the ends proposed by our polit-|' ical science, our economics, our sociology, isN there such a thing as evaluating political science^ economics, sociology themselves? May science,^ or rather must science control their determina- tion of ends? Must science ask for the sanction of those ends ? Must science examine their pass- ports? Must science call for the authority by which they rank as ends? So long as we beg the whole question by assuming the finality and inviolability of those abstract constructions, "political science," "eco- nomics," "sociology," our so-called social sciences will run into so many blind alleys. The saving clause in the situation is that the walls of these pockets are slightly porous. The moment we propose a vital question, with the purpose of turning upon it all the knowledge processes we control, the unreality of these seg- regated "sciences" is evident. For instance, suppose we face the problem: Is the increase of capitalised wealth or the in- i/ 230 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE crease of per capita consumption more to he desired in the United States today? Or suppose we approach the same problem from this angle: Shoidd a tendency toward cen- tralization of the control of capital or toward decentralization he encouraged in the United States today? Abstract as the problem appears in this ques- tion it is not an academic problem. It is the very sort of real problem before which our raw academic sciences either resort to debating-so- ciety generalities, or they balk and shy into easier paths and thus confess judgment of incapacity. Yet fires are smoldering at Bethlehem, at Pitts- burgh, at Chicago, which at any moment may kindle these very problems into a national con- flagration. Suppose our institute of social science re- solved to struggle with the problem. It would necessarily first reckon with the preparatory stages of the scientific process discussed in the last two lectures. It would be obliged to make out a provisional conspectus of the people of the United States in their present situation thought of as ! a complex of achieved values combined in a momentary status. I have proposed a scheme for such an exhibit in the fiftieth chapter of General Sociology. The proposal is crude enough in all THE EVALUATING PHASE 231 conscience, and I would be the first to welcome a better one; but nobody to my knowledge has submitted a substitute in competition. The institute would be obliged, in the second place, to make out a qualitative and a quanti- tative analysis of the valuations at present held by the people of the United States, and to trace the isothermal lines of their distribution. Assuming that some fairly reliable prelimi- nary survey of these contents of our present life had been made, a starting-point for this particu- lar phase of the task of national self-knowledge would have to be determined. The alternative phrasings of the one prob- \ lem having been reconsidered, the question would ( at once present itself, ''desired" by whom? or J "encouraged" by whom? Here our institute would be face to face with a concrete particular under the universal problem of evaluation. The generalized ques- ^ tion is : What is the ultimate criterion of human f ^• valuation f Some subspecies of this question is involved at every point in the scale of human relations, from the upper level of epistemology and general ethics down to the plane of indi- vidual choices in the daily routine. Our institute could perform no more timely service than the work waiting to be done at 232 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE this point. There is more available insight into the criteria of moral valuation than there was v^hen Kant wrote; more than when Jeremy Bentham wrote; more than when John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer wrote. That insight has not yet been focalized, however, in a way which appeals to many men as more demon- strative than moral perceptions of a generation ago. To express the situation in a different figure, there is material in solution in the think- ing of all social scientists today sufficient to form the nucleus of a moral philosophy quite as dis- tinct and a thousand times more capacious than any of the great historical schools of morals. This material has not been precipitated in a form that arrests concerted attention. Nothing could as surely promote the formu- lation of the knowledge at our command in a way which would win the widest assent, as co- operation of the different types of men that our institute would contain. Each would call for his own sort of expansion of the multiple standard of value which today's insight tends to construct ; and the concurrent appeal to a composite standard would crystallize judgments which are now fluid about the criteria of social values which must be accepted as the best at human command. Every historical attempt to answer the ques- THE EVALUATING PHASE 233 tion: "By what standard should we measure,' desirabihties ?" has sooner or later made the\ mistake of setting up a criterion which was in ) effect a limitation rather than a test. The hedon- / ist's "pleasure"; the perfectionist's "virtue"; the! utilitarian's "happiness," each in its way met this fate. Functioning at first as a guide toward moral valuation, each ended by blocking the way toward thoroughly vital judgments of moral values. Our minds play tricks upon* themselves with every verbal symbol of finality which they employ as a measure of conduct. Whenever we strain after a supreme verbal expression of the criterion of human actions it always turns out that we have merely delivered ourselves over to another device for setting bounds to our appre- hension of moral values. Whether we express our uttermost imaginings of desirability in some variation of the religious conception "accomplishment of the divine purpose," or in some variation of the philosophical conception summuni homim, the content which we associate with the phrase is always somebody's assemblage and construction of particular valuations. Our phrases for criteria of moral valuations always, amount therefore in application to requisitions that conduct to be approved must conform to a predetermined structural scheme, just as a block 234 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE of Stone is building material or waste according as the shape and size in which it has been hewn fit it or not for a designated spot shown in the architect's specifications. The innumerable experiences of this result furnish a certain backing to the men who flout every effort to simplify and standardize moral valuations. These resistances come from all quarters of the compass. They represent on the one hand radically unsocial tendencies. The interest of men thus actuated is of course in impeaching all moral standards except that one : which leaves them free to pursue their own j individualistic programs. On the other hand, ^ these resistances come from men who have not yet fully learned the lesson of the failure of all categorical systems of morals. These men do not intentionally oppose the installation of a more effective moral criterion. They earnestly long for it ; but in spite of the lessons of the past they persist in demanding another fore- doomed "final" criterion or nothing. If we can- not propose a standard of conduct which is verbally impregnable, these men are unable to see that a less absolute criterion is worth anything at all. Yet the test proposed may be mentally and morally so stimulating and enlightening THE EVALUATING PHASE 235 that its dynamic force far more than compen- sates for its logical fallibility. An absolute standard of anything, for limited minds, is a chimera. Since Sir William Hamil- ton we have no excuse for dubiousness about the conclusion that finite beings can never be manipulators of "the absolute" except in their hallucinations. Standards of human conduct which would correspond with the nebulous patterns inviting our imaginations when we demand infallible categories of moral judgment would be monuments marking termini. Men have no business with termini. We are in the midst of a career whose orbit, so far as we know, is parabolic. Our task is to determine the path- of our orbit as far ahead as we can calculate it, \ not to plot moral topography at infinity. I have deliberately made this excursus into ranges of philosophy far outside of social sci- ence. I have done it for a specific and practical reason. At the risk of writing myself down as "easy" I will assume that no one who has given serious thought to social science is in the former class of objectors to the systematizing of moral evaluation. On the other hand, during twenty-nine years of teaching college seniors and graduates I have never been entirely out of touch with one or more students, not to mention many 236 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE , older men, who represented the second type of 'reaction. They were halted in the ethical phases of their sociological thinking because no infal- \ lible criterion of social action could be proposed. I have gone out of my way to recognize this difficulty. I do not want anyone to think I am unaware of the implications and the responsibili- ties involved in attempting to evaluate human con- duct. On the other hand, I want it to be known that for the last twenty years I have been balan- cing what I am about to say against the weightiest arguments I could find in the literature of cate- gorical moral philosophy. I may be wrong, but if there is anything in other types of ethical theory to convict me of error I have failed to find it after years of search; and the more I have hunted after such correction the less persuasive all the dialectic and speculative arguments have appeared. Let us return then to our sample question with its two profiles, namely : First, Is increase of capitalized wealth or of per capita consumption more to he desired in the United States today? Second, Should a tendency toward centralization of the control of capital or toward decentralization he encouraged in the United States today? I will squarely face the matter-of-fact ques- THE EVALUATING PHASE 237 tion which, if pressed to its last impHcations, punctures all the categorical criteria that philoso- phy has ever proposed; namely, "desired" by whom? "encouraged" by whom? Without a blush I return the shamelessly homespun answer, Desired and encouraged by the consensus of our \ ^ institute of social science! Could anything be more banal! Could any- thing more ignorantly trifle with the final prob- lem of moral philosophy! Could there be a weaker attempt to cover failure by impudence ! In full posssession of my senses I have invited this retort, and I am prepared to stand or fall by my answer. What I mean is this : The whole series of proposed philosophical "ultimates" of moral judgment — "happiness," "perfection,"' "rectitude," "the greatest good of the greatest number," and their variations — have turned out to be essentially like the principal schedules in anl American tariff. They have been written by' their friends for the benefit of their friends. When we have allowed the clergy to prescribe the moral code for the laity, we have had a clerical cast of life. When we have allowed rulers to prescribe the moral code for subjects, we have had a rulers' regime. When we have allowed masters to prescribe the moral code for w^orkmen, we have had a masters' society. In 238 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE the same way, when we have allowed abstract philosophers to construe ultimate criteria of moral values, those criteria have contained just the degree and kind of wisdom which their mak- ers could put into them, and no more. They were defective with the defects of their au- thors' knowledge, and vision, and judgment. The moment wider knowledge, larger vision, juster judgment have dictated our moral valuations, the categories have proved to possess just the au- thority of their authors' grasp of the situation, no more. In other words, all our paraphernalia of pre- tentious philosophical formulations of moral criteria represent simply this state of things: So far as the persons who made or who hold the respective formulas are able to judge, those formulas stand for the actual scale of moral goods. That is, standards of human action are always at most merely digests of the best human wisdom that can be brought into judgment upon the action. It may or may not always be convenient to adopt single words or phrases in recapitula- tion of this fact; words or phrases which visual- ize or epitomize as well as possible the criteria or the specific judgments which follow from the use of the criteria. Whether we adopt such devices THE EVALUATING PHASE 239 or not, the truth remains that the devices have no more and no less vahdity than the tenabiHty of the supposed knowledge, and the inferences from the knowledge which the users of the stand- ard compose into and extract from their re- spective formulas. What I said then amounts to this: What always has been in fact let us now candidly declare, viz.. The last available measure of de-S sirability in human affairs is the best wisdom of *| men that can be applied in judgment of the \ affairs. To reword my first answer a little more accurately: In so far as an approximation to reliable evaluation of conduct may be looked j for at all from academic sources, not formulas of individual theorists, or of types of theorists, but decisions rendered by such a composite council as zve have supposed, would be the most enlightened appraisal of moral values that science \ can reach. • The school of moral philosophy in which Adam Smith was both pupil and teacher referred moral valuations at last to the hypothetical "dis- passionate observer." We have gone beyond this. We know that the most dispassionate indi- vidual possible would still be at best only a par- tial observer. We want to widen the appeal to 240 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE a council of dispassionate observers. But our scientific criteria are now even more exacting than that. We want to insure not merely the checking up and the checking off of one observer's partialness by that of many others, but we want to insure as far as possible the correction of the collective partialness of all the observers by loyal deference to the reality observed. In proposing a criterion of evaluation which is at first glance wholly incredible, I believe I have proposed something much more essentially scientific than any criterion in a form convenient for extraction of deductive conclusions. The^ .^ most we can possibly know about the value of -U^"^ f any range or kind or case of human conduct is^^r^ • the most that can be concluded about it by con- X^j sensus of men measuring the conduct from alu^r , of its discoverable angles. The boast of science, ^j^^ • ever since there has been a pretense of science, (^^ has been that it is the output of this all-sided jv^'j' endeavor. It has been, and it is, to the limit of our partially organized methods of investiga- tion. Social science, at all events, has not yet used to the full the evaluating ability which is actually available for passing on the greater or less worth of accessible means for the present and future purposes of men. In the estimate of science, not of special inter- THE EVALUATING PHASE 241 ests, evaluation of means for immediate ends must always be credible simply in the degree in which the minor valuation is held as a term in the scale of valuation of all ends, up to the largest and last that can be brought into human view. This valuation can never be essentially a matter of definition nor of category; although defini- tions and categories are always worth what they are worth as tools of inquiry and of control. The definitions and the categories, however, are merely symbols of the amount and kind of wis-\ dom which the inquirers can bring to bear upon / the particular problem. The real task in all( evaluation is an appraisal of the time, place, degree, and manner of all the functionings con- cerned in the situation. When we confront a real question, like the sample I have suggested, the problem is to shape up all the influences which one program exerts upon all the present interests of Americans, and to put the exhibit into comparison with an exhibit of all the influences whic^ would be exerted by a possible alternative program. Then the evalu- ative question is, Which collection and tendency of influences are more desirable for present Americans? In the last resort definitions do not, cannot, and should not decide such questions, even for 242 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE academic science. Such answers as are in vogue at all are such approaches to consensus among scientists of different sorts as are arrived at by our present long-distance exchange of views be- tween scientists. In the interest of scientific honesty, of scientific clearness, of scientific serv- ice, let us frankly conform our declarations and our practices to the facts. It is not as though we were novices in the world. Experience has given us wide expanses of knowledge of the difference between good and evil in human conditions and in human prac- tices. We have no need to disguise in sacramen- tal phrase the literal procedure which is our wisest course toward more knowledge and richer experience. / The most reliable criterion of human values \ which science can propose would he the con- \sensus of councils of scientists representing the J largest possible variety of human interests, and to-operating to reduce their special judgments to a scale which would render their due to each of \the interests in the total calculation. This declaration of principles, and the pro- gram which it implies, would not be the abdica- tion of science. It would be science stripped of cant. It would be science with its eyes open. It would be science with its decks cleared for action ! THE EVALUATING PHASE 243 From this outlook there is nothing Utopian whatsoever in anticipating the development of institutes of social science, composed not alone of academic men, by any means, but reinforced more and more by scientific men of action func- tioning as councils of elder statesmen, and focus- ing all the wisdom within human reach upon the conduct of men's affairs. LECTURE IX THE CONSTRUCTIVE PHASE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE Something remains to be said on the sub- ject of the last lecture. In the present lecture so much must be said about the relations of the evaluative phase of science to the constructive phase that it is necessary to have an understand- ing at the outset about the meaning of our words. While I have referred to the evaluative pro- cess in a more general sense, I mean by it in par- ticular the process by which students of social science arrive at social valuations. J By social valuations I mean judgments of i desirable or undesirable social conditions or social [procedures. My reservations in earlier lectures entitle me to restrict my use of these terms now to the relatively developed form of them which plays its part in general social science. The child begins to evaluate as soon as it begins to pay attention. The child begins to have valua- tions of things wanted or not wanted — things hard, that hurt; things soft, that soothe; things bright, that attract; things dull, that repel, etc. Before it is out of the cradle the child begins 244 THE CONSTRUCTIVE PHASE 245 to have other kinds of valuations for ways to get the wanted things and to avoid the not- wanted things. From those Hkes and disHkes which are more reflex than rational up to the most complex philosophical judgments there are innumerable gradations of valuations within corresponding diameters of interest. I am con- fining myself now to those valuations of social desirability or undesirability which are arrived at by the most credible scientific methods that men control. Still further, what I said in the last lecture! applied more strictly to valuations of social ends, that is to conditions to be attained or avoided, than to valuations of social means, that is ways of attaining or avoiding the respective ends. Although the subject of the present lecture is the constructive phase of social science, I shall make this aspect of the scientific process less prominent than further reference to the evalua- tive phase. This is primarily because academic, people, whether they will or no, have relatively'; much more opportunity for influence upon thei evaluative than upon the constructive scientific 1 processes — at least upon the final stages of con-( struction. I would point out at once that in stages of social science in which construction is at the 246 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE I forefront the evaluative process falls into a sec- I ondary role, and is most active not in apprais- ' ing ends but in selecting means to attain the ends. It would require a treatise to show how this process functions in different combinations at different stages of generalization. To avoid confusion as far as possible I restrict my terms arbitrarily. \For the present, therefore, I mean here and no^ by the evaluating phase of social science that part of it in which we arrive at judgments about things to be desired or avoided by groups or types of people, or judgments of means for attaining or avoiding those things. Those judgments themselves I call valuationsTJ Let me illustrate : The judgments now prevailing in England that it is good for English- men to have a hereditary upper house, an estab- lished church, ecclesiastical control of primary education, and a system of primogeniture; or with reference to American conditions the judg- ments that children should not be obliged to work for pay before a certain age; that such and such sanitary conditions should prevail in given occu- pations; that there should be a certain minimum wage for labor; that a certain number of cubic feet of space per occupant should be required in city dwellings; that there should be cer- THE CONSTRUCTIVE PHASE 247 tain uniform marriage and divorce laws in all the states; that senators should be chosen by popular vote; that women should be admitted to the suffrage; that government should have a larger share in determining the rules of busi- ness, etc. I use these illustrations with no impli- cation about their scientific credentials, and particularly without implying any opinion of my own as to the pros and cons with reference to a single one of them. Any one of these judg- ments, simply as such, whether it is valid or invalid, whether it is held by many or by few, is a specimen of what I mean by the term valuation. I repeat that I do not assert either that we have or that we have not scientific conclusions in either of these premises. The subjects are merely taken as illustrations of conditions upon which scientific conclusions are desirable. So far as we have conclusions, they are valuations after their kind, as I now use the term. Moreover, assuming for the sake of illustration that we have such conclusions, whatever their import, so far as one of those conclusions was arrived at as a result of conscious effort the process of reach- ing that judgment is what I mean in the present connection by evaluation. I hope a historical case will help to bring out 248 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE the things that I want most to emphasize at this point. In 1 8 14 two eminent professors of Roman law began a controversy which has its echoes still among legal theorists throughout the world. Thibaut at Heidelberg uttered an appeal for the construction of a national code for all Germans. If we apply our present terms in recalling the incident, Thibaut published the valuation that a national code would be a good thing for all Germans. It is true that there is an element of con- struction in all evaluation. As there can be no construction except with the leverage of valua- tion, the man who does the work of evaluation must also be credited in the final account with some share in construction. German historians today would doubtless without exception agree in this sense that Thibaut did something toward initiating the influences which at last formed the imperial German code. I would certainly not dissent from this judgment. So far as immediate and visible consequences were concerned, however, Thibaut simply reit- erated his valuation, and with that his initiative shot its bolt. Another and still more eminent man had a valuation which he promptly published in oppo- sition to Thibaut. Savigny at Berlin did not THE CONSTRUCTIVE PHASE 249 directly deny the desirability of a national code for Germans. His procedure was rather an evaluation of the means available for producing such a code. In an elaborate argument, which is among the curiosities of social science, Savigny developed the proposition that Roman lawyers at a certain period were so uniquely endowed with a talent for jurisprudence that their work was not only a model for all time, but because of the inferior endowment of later men it must be accepted as settling rules of law for all time. That is, Savigny's valuation of the means for producing a German code was negative. With reference to popular construc- tion of the sort desired by Thibaut, Savigny's valuation was in effect a negative valuation of the end itself. Singularly enough neither of these scholars appeared to realize the full significance of the decisive factor in the situation. Thibaut may have been right that there was legal talent enough in Germany to produce a national code. Savigny may have been wrong in crediting Roman lawyers of two thousand years earlier with a monopoly of legal genius. They were both wrong in confining the question so narrowly to those considerations. The central fact was that the Germans were not a single state. They were 250 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE scores of states. They had memories and theo- ries of unity, but these overhanging shadows of nationahty were in many ways more disturbing than harmonizing. The grim fact, more potent than all the theories, was that there could not be one code until there was one people. Before there could be a process of legal creation there must have been a process of social creation. A unified Germany was the necessary precondition of a unified code for Germany. Both these schol- ars knew this. Both referred to it. Neither of them, however, seemed to give it as much impor- tance in his reckoning as even a half -fledged historical scholar would today find that it had in reality, if he inquired into the facts of the period. I use this illustration here not merely to bring out the contrast between evaluation on the one hand and objective social construction on the other, but still further to hint at the usual limita- tions of academic men in connection with these two aspects of the scientific process. Please observe that I say ''usual." I do not say invari- able either in kind or degree. I shall presently speak more in detail about this matter. So far as the actual work of organizing the social labor of founding a national German code was concerned, Thibaut reached his limit in standing for the valuation that such a code was THE CONSTRUCTIVE PHASE 251 desirable. With all his services for historical jurisprudence Savigny functioned in this connec- tion on the whole as an arrester of construction. He stood for his negative valuation of the means available for the production of such a code. Who then were the efficient constructors of the imperial German code now in force? Why, in a word, the men from Bliicher to Moltke who did the rough soldier work, and the other men summarized by the symbolic name of Bismarck who did the rough and the smooth work of diplomacy and statecraft, and the mil- lions of unheralded men in all the industries who produced an economic unity which demanded political unity. Here then is a picture from life of the abstract distinction : Evaluation in social ^science is a process of arriving at judgments about things worth doing and of ways of doing them; construction is a process of applying human forces to the doing of the things. I do not mean that German scholars had no more part in the process which reached the end of an epoch at Versailles in 1871. Isolating this incident of an early academic debate, however, it sharply silhouettes the distinction between evaluation and construction. For further purposes of illustration, I cite a movement directly connected with the event 252 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE just mentioned and with the situation referred to in the preceding illustration. On October 6, 1872, a conference occurred at Eisenach which marks the launching of the most clearly defined, the most energetic, and the most comprehensive attempt ever successfully undertaken by academic men in the way of social construction. It was the first formal session of the Verein fiir SocialpqUtik. The gen- eral purpose of the organization was described in the opening address as follows : I '.'First of all, it is our hope by co-operation to < find a basis for the reform of our social condi- l tions, to gain general acceptance of ideas which \ have long been held here and there but which have as yet not become decisive in public , opinion" In brief the primary purpose of the move- ment was to create and to crystallize public opinion in Germany in the direction of certain fundamental valuations held by the promoters. The ultimate purpose was to make this public opinion effective in molding the civic and eco- nomic policies of Germany. The knowledge of the men best acquainted with this movement from the beginning until now would probably be overtaxed if they under- took precisely to distribute the work of the THE CONSTRUCTIVE PHASE 253 organization and of its individual members between our categories "evaluation" and "con- struction." I shall attempt nothing of the sort. I shall return to the illustration in a moment. At present I refer to the case as in many respects the most exemplary constructive enterprise that has ever been carried on by scholars in the social sciences. This is my particular point : Evaluation f and construction were combined in the movement, \ but the emphasis — in the prospectus and in the Subsequent program — has always been heavy jupon the primary work of planting valuations in { the minds of Germans. In my own judgment general experience and the experience of these particular men confirm the wisdom of this empha- sis, as a model for social scientists as a rule. It certainly did not turn out to make the work of these men abortive. On the contrary, it would be a ludicrously superficial history of the new Ger- man empire which did not give prominence to the work of the Verein fiir Socialpolitik. Selecting now another point of departure, I will use a series of detached propositions to de-, fine the viewpoint of this lecture: \ 1. The evaluative phase of social science is; quite distinct in kind from the constructive phase.,V 2. Some sort of evaluation precedes construc-j 2 54 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE jtion, but construction does not necessarily succeed / evaluation. 3. The investigator and the teacher as such have only restricted scope for changing social evaluation into social construction. 4. No general rules can define the duties of academic men with respect to the constructive phase of their own science. 5. Although social science is abortive unless social evaluation passes into corresponding social action, the work of individuals which stops in one of the preparatory phases of social science need not be abortive. Division of labor may provide for its continuation by other men. 6. No infallible means are know^n for trans- forming social valuations into corresponding social constructions. I proceed to expand these propositions, though not in detail and not in the order just stated. If the college students among whom I began twenty-nine years ago to practice my naivete in history and economics had asked me whether it was the vocation of professors of social science to reform the world, I should without compunc- tion have answered, Yes. ! My present estimate of the service to be ex- V pected of academic men puts it no lower in degree THE CONSTRUCTIVE PHASE 255 than I should have rated it then; but I certainly classify the academic function now as chiefly dif- fering in kind from that which I then assumed as a matter of course. One of the most obvious limitations of the academic cast of mind is inability to distinguish between the evaluative and the creative phases of conduct. This trait registers itself in the com- placency with which the academic man contem- plates his valuations of social forces, as though there were no unbridged chasms between these appraisals and application of them. jThe aca- demic man — and I am willing to be understood as a reluctant witness in a matter of personal experience — the_academk. man k apt to draw a sigh of righteous relief, as of one who. has fin- ished ^ the XQurse^-andJkept the faith, when^Jie thinks that he has Justified the conclusion, for example, that an inheritance tax is right, or that the social evil should be. Jrealed_.itLJLhis__or that w^y. Among the consequences of this fact is on the one hand too.ready, assumption by academic men ihajjconclusions are reliable .which have, not satisfied the_ ^t of exp erience ; andjon the other hand too willing aloofness from the work of cpJ'Tii)Jejbng„ihe__sci,^^^^ cycle by_carrying on kno wing and evalu ating into doing. The aca- demic man is prone to draw arbitrary lines for 256 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE ranking purposes between theory and action. While he claims tKat so-called practical men have too little regard for science, it is quite as true that the academic man has too little _regard for ^actice. When the practical man meets the aca- demic man's valuation, I will not say with his blunt, "How do you know ?" but with the equally incredulous, "What of it?" "What are you going to do with it?" or "What are you going to do about it?" the academic man is apt to reply by his attitude if not in so many words: "That is not my affair. Here is a truth which concerns you. Take it or leave it. My duty is done and my conscience is clear. 3 The emphasis of the present lecture is on the consideration that there is more "science" in the practical man's questions, "What of it?" "What are you going to do with it?" "What are you going to do about it?" than in the academic man's often implied answer. fThe scientific jgro- cess is not completed in description, explanation, and eyaluation,. If there were no other reason, it would be enough that we have no right _to regard our description, explanation, and evalua- tion^as themselves complete until they have sus- tained the Jest of experiment. This test might disclose flaws at innumerable points in the earlier partial processes^7 THE CONSTRUCTIVE PHASE 257 In arguing to this proposition I do not mean to imply that scientific men are bound to play a larger part directly in practical affairs, ^y point at present is rather that practical., meu, whether they are in academic positions or not, are bound to ^lay a larger part in science?) To be perfectly clear I must explain myself a little further. Whether academic men may be more useful than they have been in activi- ties beyond their proper academic scope is a question which I do not raise in this general form. Some individuals may be and properly. Some individuals may not be and quite as prop- erly. Academic social scientists on the whole may function best, in some times and places, if they combine their academic duties in a much larger way than is the rule at present with their teach- ing and investigating functions. I am not now^ dealing with that problem. I bring no charge \ therefore against academic men for having had / no more to do with "social reform," as that idea is generally understood in the modern litera- ture of "muckraking" and "uplift." Indeed, if ( / 1 were to make^^^^ Ameri- / can teachers of social science, it would be against ^ those of their number who have been prema- turely eager to _jn£Luencfi_ .social policies rather than too indifferent. Certain men have been 258 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE over-ambitious to apply science which they did not have. They have thus discredited science in general. Our social science might have been farther advanced if all our investigators had kept both eyes constantly on their investigations, if there had been no one among them who kept one eye always and both eyes sometimes on a public more interested in schemes than in science. "^Those are most worthy of admiration among academic men who have the patience and the courage to put their whole strength into that for which they are chosen, that for which they are presumably best fitted and best equipped, namely, the purely pedagogical or investigative phases of science.1 I (Jt is conceivable that our world might be a /better world than it is if philosophers, men of theory, investigators were also the world's ex- ecutive officersT) Many men from Plato down have been of that opinion. I could not complain of Providence if academic men on the average exhibited more genius than they do for practi- cal affairs. As things now stand, however, it j appeals to me as a fortunate dispensation that there are people more efficient than academic men on the average in bringing things to pass. The moral which I would draw is not that aca- demic men should neglect any work in which THE CONSTRUCTIVE PHASE 259 1 they might increase their usefulness without*^ ^<>- ^ restricting their primary function, but that they k, ^ should regard their academic work as presum- / p>v ably their main business, and should const- fyj-^, quently in most cases be willing to fall into the j i rank of supporters instead of aiming to be lead-y ers of actual execution. t The point at which I would begin to blame | academic men, if it were necessary to select i such a point, is not where their inevitable aca- \ demic limitations begin, but where they slur j over the meaning of those limitations for sci- j ence itself, not to say for social practice in the \ more popular sense. That is, I blame social sci- | entists if they assume that their scientific task j is finished with their descriptions and analyses \ and evaluations. This attitude has too much in j common with the old ecclesiastical distinction ^ \ between the religious life and the secular. \1 f^? blame social scientists if they fail to realize that^^^v^ turning valuations into action is not something \S{^ subsequent to science but the normal comple- tion of science?) 1 For the purposes of the present argument, . \ then, I am not asking what are the implications of j the distinction between evaluative and construct- l ive processes for the actual distribution of I labor among academic men, or for the division of 1 26a THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE labor between academic and non-academic men. This question would require endless discussion of particular cases. Regardless of consequences one way or another in this respect, I am now emphasizing the fact that, within the body of science but over and above the descriptive, ana- lytical, and evaluative functions of science, the constructive phase is the normal maturing of the whole. In the fourth lecture I said that the primary and chief function of science is to act as all men's proxy in finding out all that can be known about what sort of a world this is, and what we can do in it to^ make life most worth living. I must now add a clause to that statement. Although life is functionally vicarious through and through, although it is made up of volun- tary and involuntary services one for another, the closer we get to the completion of life at any point the more we find it to be less a matter of doing for one another than with one another. The intensest social functioning is not that of benefactor and beneficiary but of partner and partner. I would carry this proposition over into the realm of social science. In the last analysis social science cannot be in the heads or the hands or the books of some men in trust for other men. THE CONSTRUCTIVE PHASE 261 Social science has no way to complete itself j except as the accomplished habit of human \ beings. The last phase of social science is the j transmuting of valuations into life. ^ There is no infallible formula for this r change. (Jndeed the bi^ unsolved problem of the explanatory phase both of social science and of . individual psychology is the mystery of the gap between knowing and doing?) Individuals have often discoursed sagely upon the evils of idle- ness, of improvidence, and of licentiousness; yet some of the same individuals have ruined them- selves by the very self-indulgence which their knowledge condemned. Probably more than a majority of the people in every civilized nation believe today that war is an immeasurable evil; yet each nation spends a fabulous sum annually in direct preparation for war — which is not inexplicable under the circumstances — ^but it is inexplicable that those same nations spend rela- tively nothing in direct assurance of peace. As a phenomenon this is merely an illustra- tion of the case discussed in the seventh lecture. Men always act because of valuations which they hold, and after the event the kind of action chosen shows which of their valuations prevailed. Before the event we cannot tell with certainty which of their valuations men will ratify in 262 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE action and which they will disregard. Here therefore are frontier problems for individual and social psychology. All of us are anxious for more light on these problems. Meanwhile all the men whose division of labor is persuasion of children or adults to realize the more rather than the less reasonable valuations are in strenu- ous competition with all the drummers for the more pleasant rather than the more reasonable valuations. It is in the interest of scientific and human progress frankly to admit that we do not know very much about ways and means of in- ducing the choice of rationally preferable valua- tions. For eleven years I lived in a beautifully situated and in many respects delightful New England college town of eight thousand inhabit- ants. Few towns in New England had greater natural advantages. Few, if any, could justly boast of residents on the average higher in the scale of intelligence and culture and mo- rality. Yet, although the residence area of the town was rather more compactly occupied than is usual in towns of that type, there was not a sewer in its territory; nor was there a public water supply. No one knew to what extent his own well was a cesspool. For years, whenever the subject was alluded to, the valuations were THE CONSTRUCTIVE PHASE 263 affirmed and accepted as a matter of course that a water supply and a drainage system would be good things for the town. But that was the end of it ; for a long term of years the valuations had no more energizing force, and rather less apparent prospect of passing into action, than the valuation of the same persons that sectarian jealousy ought not to exist. This case was not a freak. It presents the ground pattern of all human situations after the evaluative stage of knowledge has been reached. The transition from the evaluative to the crea- tive stage may be instantaneous. It may not be completed in millennia. xQur knowledge of probabilities, and of ways and means of realizing the possibilities of converting the one phase into the other is extremely provincial and inexact. This, however^ js the _km^^ knowledge which is rnpstjn._.demand^.-and-mO-St.difficu all the phases of knowledge involved i^^^ com- plete process of social sciencer) How may the only child in a family be led to form the habits prescribed by the family valuations? How may an additional valuation held by wise men in many nations gain lodgment in our international code? At bottom the problem is the same at the two extremes. The man or the group that has a valuation, and wants to be not merely an 264 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE evaluator but a realizer, faces the same uncer- tainty, whatever the type of problem. Be the individual teacher, preacher, editor, politician, legislator, reformer, or whatever, each man who wants to induce other men to convert a valua- tion into a condition faces a distinct task of overcoming mental inertia. There is no sure way of measuring that inertia, nor of applying a force sufficient to overcome it. There will be more or less exact precedents for the case. There will be much or little experience in similar cases to furnish useful guidance. The experi- ence may have been so accurately observed and statistically tabulated that certain probabilities of success in using certain means may be antici- pated. Yet after all each attempt of men to in- duce a constructive effort by an individual or by a group has to take its own chances with an inscrutable hiatus between valuation and voli- tion. Each social constructor virtually makes the same appeal to his public which St. Paul made to the church at Philippi: "If you know any things that are true, honorable, just, pure, lovable, or respectable, in the name of all that is virtuous and praiseworthy apply your minds to these things." It may turn out that this initial difficulty of securing attention is nine-tenths of the whole THE CONSTRUCTIVE PHASE 265 creative problem. We may find that the psy- chological statement of the problems of social reconstruction will reduce each of them to the technique of concentrating attention. Whether this is true or not, the stake that we must drive down at this point marks the fact that valuations do not realize themselves. There is the same difference between valuations and corresponding social conditions that there is between a conclu- sion that a trip around the world would pay, and actually making the journey. If I were to be held strictly accountable for a list of "valuations," in the sense in which I have defined the term, particularly if I meant valuations both scientifically established and generally accepted, I confess the catalogue would be short and unpretentious. We may claim to have scientifically justified considerable sys- tems of technique for operating our existing industrial, political, legal, educational, and re- ligious institutions. Of course this technique is largely on trial, and the conditions within which it functions are so fluid that modifications of the technique are in constant progress. Out- side of these technologies, and excluding mere formulations of existing conditions, all our social sciences together have not yet established very many available conclusions by unassailable 266 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE logical processes. When we approach the point where social science should deliver its results for practice we have to admit, if we are honest, that such science in the completest sense does not exist. In its place we have merely an unrealized ideal. The conditions necessary for achieving the ideal in any precise degree are far beyond the present reach of human powers. What follows? Does everything that I have said go for nothing? Is all the effort of all our so-called social sciences mere useless parade? Have we no basis at all for constructive social action ? \l think we have a very^_broad and_deep ba^is, a basis on w hich constructive_sociaL^.scientists may stand_ firm. But we shall not find our foot- ing until we have freed ourselves of unscientific |ectarianism_on the one hand and of unscientific (jtretentiousnjesi)^^ By unscientific sectarianism I mean the folly of our jealous academic tradition of the separate- ness and self-sufficiency of our perfunctory divisions of science. By unscientific pretentious- ness I mean persistence in deluding ourselves, al- though we deceive no one else, with the fiction that our scientific structure already conforms to its ideals. With these qualifications we are justified as THE CONSTRUCTIVE PHASE 267 social scientists in an assured and aggressive atti- tude toward our share of men's tasks. Just where our attainments stand in the scale of final logical analysis is an impertinent question when we are concerned with the creative phase of social conduct. I have said that social conduct and the creative phase of social science should be identical. That is, in their objective comple- tion social science and social actjon are ideally.^ and practically convergent. Social science ha^ all the rational apparatus and material which human experience has developed as its equip- ment for social partnership. If it cannot bring an infallible factor into the problems of plain men it may bring to each one of those prob- lems, from the primary perplexities of the house- hold up to the last question of international relations, all the rational aids to judgment which the experience of all men together has assembled. To ask more would be preposterousTj Nor need we go far away in time or space for pattern instances of co-operative work be- tween academic men and non-academic men in constructive social science. The cases in point are not confined to Germany by any means. Not to speak of the splendid work of social con- struction carried on by men and women in other than academic positions — Miss Addams is one of X t/ 268 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE the best illustrations — we have already in this country an inspiring tradition of the construct- ive combination of social reason and social prac- tice by academic men. In Wisconsin, for instance, Professors Mc- ■Carthy, Meyer, and Reinsch have been giving academic men a new vision of their opportuni- ties by their services to the state in connection i with the administration of railroads, and in preparation of legislative bills on many subjects. In our own faculty Professors Freund, Hender- son, and Merriam not only have proposed valua- tions but they have been initiators of constructive action in the city council, in the legislature, ,and in many business concerns. They have turned knowledge that has been derived from all men's experience to immediate practical use. They have modified our actual dealings with the criminal and the dependent. They have changed standards and conduct with reference to occu- pational diseases. They have contributed to a solution of the labor question by promoting industrial insurance. They have done much to make the city government more efficient and more honest. Professors Tufts and Mead have done similar work in connection with the City Club, and Professor Jordan also in promoting public hygiene. THE CONSTRUCTIVE PHASE 269 The point which I want most to urge is that, although social scientists cannot very often reduce their judgments to absolute scientific dem- onstration, the sort of knowledge which they con- trol has ajm oral hacking that amaunts-.toasight draft upon the co-operation of right-minded men, A moral infant or a moral pervert may deny that the conditions discovered by the ''Pittsburgh survey" constitute a demand for concerted action by Americans, from those most responsible and most able to discharge their responsibility to those least responsible and least able to discharge their responsibility. No morally normal man can take refuge in that kind of sophistry against the force of the facts. This instance is typical of the moral situation throughout the field of social science. With varying degrees of precision ac- cording to the situation in question, we may claim morally incontestable scientific sanction for programs of social construction that range from insurance of decent conditions of life for every willing worker to abolition of war and humaniz- ing co-operation between all civilized men. Recurring once more to the Verein fUr Social- politik, I would emphasize in the second place the judgment which I expressed in the begin- ning, viz. : Whatever may have been the serviced 270 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE of those German scholars in the way of actual social construction — and the balance sheet of this account has not yet been drawn up — their other kind of service is likely to be, for a long time to come if not always, the more instructive precedent for American academic men. f By teaching, by addressing many different \ types of audience, by systematic publication, the members of the organization changed the valu- ations of Germans both about social means { and about social ends. Whatever we in America may think of these valuations in themselves, they -have actually been wrought into the fabric of German life. In general a parallel relation to the entire social task must be assumed as the primary calling of American academic men. Whatever we may be able to do more must be regarded as the "good measure pressed down and heaped together" which most academic men are only too anxious to give in full discharge of their stewjardship. /Our first and largest function as academic men must always be to help our fellow-men find ojit what is true, and ho norable, and J ust, and pure, and lovable, and reputable. We shall at least ha ve done a nece ssary p art if we do- Jio THE CONSTRUCTIVE PHASE 271 more than keep attention fixed on these„ things, while other men are doing the subsequent work of mo£e directly making these valuations bear the ripened fruits ^^actionj LECTURE X THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE The subject of this lecture seems to threaten prophecy. In substance it will be resume, pro- fession of faith, and exhortation, after the good old homiletical pattern. Our generation is witness that the case ! MEN VERSUS MEN''s PROBLEMS has taken a change of venue from the theological court to \the sociological. The good man who sits in the seat by courtesy called St. Peter's is the most plaintive evidence of this transfer. What could more surely provoke Olympian laughter than combination of claim to doctrinal infallibility with calls for intellectual castration, in encyc- licals that command men to find truth not in pro- gressive study of the human lot but in return to St. Charles Borromeo! Regret that "modern- ism" is here, and edicts to resist it, might as well be grief that the present geologic age is not the Paleozoic. In calling attention to the fact that modern criteria of truth are not theological but socio- logical, I do not of course use either term in the special academic sense. The theology of all modernists is progressively sociological, and by 272 THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 273 the latter term I refer in this connection not to a special academic division of labor but to the whole large method of social science. This method is ' throughout objective investigation and evaluation of human experience^ with the purpose of con-) structing valuations into more complete realiza-(^ tions. The man with broken bones needs the sur- geon. The man striken with fever needs nurse and physician. The man with shattered nerves needs the neurologist. There are phases and stages of social development — whether normal or pathological need not be asked for our present purpose — in which demoniacal or theological practice is indicated for minds distressed. If men believe in evil spirits and fear them, the sorcerer and the magician are the natural recourse. If men believe in a divinity thirsty for human blood and fear him, as in the stage symbolized by the story of Abraham and Isaac, then the flaming altar and the human sacrifice meet the spiritual need. If men believe in the God of mediaeval western theology and fear him, then subjection to dogmas supposed to have been committed to his special agents is the only solace and insurance. In fact, however, a differentiation is inevitable in the moral world analogous with that in the physical world. Organic life does not remain 274 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE vegetable alone. It does not stop with mollusks. While vegetable life of very low orders remains, while mollusks survive, the flora and fauna of the earth develop in countless forms. Along with plants which can scarcely be distinguished from inorganic matter and animals which might easily be mistaken for plants, we have side by side the ascending orders of vegetable and animal species including every variety of men. Accordingly there are still men to whom no higher appeal can be made than that of magic. There are others who feel no mental nor moral suasion beyond that of dogma. There are still others to whom dogma is only a more pretentious magic; to whom the observable processes of the physical and moral world are the final recourse for expansion and correction of the provisional knowledge and valuation with which each genera- tion takes up the destiny partially worked out by all \yho have gone before. jWe do not know whether the time will ever come when all the men living on this planet will be freed from the superstitions and the fears for which magic and dogma are the appropriate pre- scription. We do not know that the time will ever come when men's knowledge of what is good in their situation, and men's yisions of unrealized valuations will supersede all less rational control- THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 275 Igxapl-theixxonduct. The trend of social science, however, the spirit .al_"modernism/-l the out- reachings of plain men's desires wherever they^ are unfettered enough to be genuine, all make stropgly and at last consciously toward this goal. Tl do not say and I do not think that social ^ science can ever be a substitute for religionj It) is getting plainer and plainer, however, that social science, in the sense in which I have usedr the term in these lectures, is the only rationale body for religion. No man has lived his Hfe to the full who is not at last, in one preserve of his personality, a mystic. It is a grub's life not to feel out after the connections of what we can know with what we cannot know; after the fulfilment of what we have been or might have been in what we may , be. From first to last religions have been men's ; more or less conscious attempts to give finite lifef its infinite rating. Science can never be an' enemy of religion. fStop the stress and strain, the rush and roar, the fuss and bluff of modern life long enough for the deeply human in us to have its chance, and the more science we have the more are we awed and lured by the mystery beyond our ken; the more do the unsatisfied longings in us yearn for larger interpretation] And this is the heart of religion. It is the 276 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE investment of such values as we have along with the best labor within our power to make them productive. We have no other scope for this work but in our intercourse with our fellow-men. In this view social science carried into the crea- tive stage is the only conceivable body in which religion can be vital. [Theological religions have always been un-' genuine because they have made the mystical the key to the real. The religion _oi social science^ wjll make the real the key to the mysticaO While men are bound to achieve this inversion in pro- portion as they become sophisticated, while men are bound in proportion as they conquer igno- rance and banish terrors of their own invention to find the meaning of life less in escaping un- known evils than in realizing known goods, it /does not follow^ that they are bound to limit the J meaning of their lives to the measure of experi- I ence. On the contrary, the more we compare the span of experience with the sweep of mystery within which we are inclosed the more certainly will our known life borrow some of its value from our thought of the infinite unknown. This again is merely a modern way of ex- pressing a reality of religion which in some degree the most spiritually minded men of all faiths have held in common. THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 277 ^ all seriousness then, and with careful weighing of my words, I register my belief thax social science is the holiest sacrament open to men. It is the holiest because it is the wholest career within the terms of human life. Restrain- ing myself from prediction, and holding strictly to confession, I am able to foresee no other development for religion than the progressive sloughing off of its ritualistic attachments and corresponding enrichment of its realistic content. The whole circumference of social science is the indicated field for those "works" without which the apostle of "salvation by faith" declared that faith is dead J Throughout these lectures • I have repeatedly expressed or implied a conception of the scope of academic social science which may be com- pared>with the function of th^ "sailing master," if there still is an officer of that title upon a battleship. Someone must be responsible- Jonall I the calculations upon which the navigation of/ the ship is based. Perhaps a better parallel would'^ be the officers and directors of an industrial plant. They must knowas much as possible about the actual^ and conceivable conditions of demand for thdr pmduct and a^^ and conceiv- a ble l irni tatio ns of their ability to supply the demand. If the operatives in the plant were as 278 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE free to use or disuse the conclusions of the officers and directors as men in general are to do What they please with formulations of social science, the likeness would be more exact. To describe this situation literally : Men are born into a physical and a social process which sets their task and circumscribes their destiny. Whether particular men ever become conscious of it or not, the experience of men in general has always been first of all assumption of a scale of meanings to be credited to the surroundings, and adoption of a corresponding scale of valuations assigned to alternatives of conduct in view of these meanings. The process of arriving at these interpretations has mounted from scarcely more than vegetative adaptation to habitat up to his- torical conflicts of ideas and civilizations. The intellectual reflection of this process has varied from folklore to philosophy. [Social science is that part of the activity of modern men which is charged with the function of investigating these social meanings and social values with all the apparatus which present knowledge can devise and which present resources can supply!) Throughout these lectures I have treated these investigations of social meanings and social values as the crowning function of social science in its strictly academic aspects. Leaving the creative THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 279 phase of social science out of view for the moment, the functions of social description, analysis, and evaluation are the pre-conditions of social construction upon a basis of reason corre- sponding with the complexity of present social conditions. In this sense and to this extent, therefore, the objective social process will be irrational, or at best incompletely reasoned, unless the indicated academic processes are performed by social science. For instance, in recent years we have become familiar with variations of the proposition that the aims of modern men have turned wealth, which is only a means, into the paramount end. Both Simmel and Sombart have made out strong cases in support of this proposition. In so far as the assertion is true, it involves the correspond- ing proposition that our modern program de- grades men from their appropriate place as ends and reduces them to the rank of means. There is probably no more urgent need among civilized men at this moment than knowledge of the precise situation referred to in these propo- sitions. Are we geared into a machinery which is grinding out the bankruptcy of civilization by consuming men as its raw material and giving back only wealth as its output? Or are we pro- 28o THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE gressively sublimating our wealth in superior types of human beings and social conditions? Surely civilizations never consciously con- fronted a more vital question about their own condition than these propositions present to think- ing men the world over today. Are we con- suming more human values in making our wealth than are given hack in the making and the using? Not a few men who are inclined to treat mere repetition of the question as an offense against society have no doubt that something like the mistake alleged was the fault of earlier civiliza- tions. It is comparatively easy to look back now^ and to detect the oncoming of social bankruptcies in the regimes of fist-law, of military exploita- tion, of absolutism, of chattel slavery. It is very hard for men who have nothing to gain and possibly much to lose by unfavorable social diag- nosis calmly to entertain the thought that their own civilization may possibly be attempting to perpetuate a social fallacy. ^ Who_shalLpas5^ upotijthis question ? Who shall determine whether or not there is a case against our capitalistic civilization? Who shall decide whether wx are moving toward the apotheosis of wealth or the apotheosis of men? Shall we leave it to the ex-par te judgment of capitalistic interests, or shall we refer it to the THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 281 most judicial commission of inquiry which it would be possible to establish? Could a more competent commission be proposed than such an institute of social science as we have imagined, or ultimately a chain of such institutes correcting one another in all the civilized nations ?J In thus reiterating that investigation is the fundamental function of social science, I admit that there are other important functions of social sciences, but I insist that all their importance is | secondary to that service by which they open the 1 way to larger realizations of life. By "larger realizations of life" I mean not merely richer mental furnishings of individuals, but more pur- poseful and more extensive functionings between . individuals in developing superior types of] association. I noticed in passing that some men extol his- tory not as science but as art. I might have said that less frequently the other social sciences are appraised highest when treated as arts. This does not mean that the men who so judge are referring to the ultimate utility of these sciences in molding social conduct. It means that these men are thinking of the mental and literary tech- nique which may be developed in handling the material of these sciences. The people who think in this way remind me of the types whose first 282 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE interest in an opera or an athletic contest or a stock show or a social settlement is in its features as a "society" affair. Whether an opera or an athletic contest or a stock show or a social settle- ment is worth supporting, is a question by itself ; but to use either as a mere occasion for social preenings, for the display of ability to out-waste and out-pose one's social rivals, rather insolently begs the question. The subject-matter of the social sciences lends itself to artistic treatment to be sure, but no one with a sane sense of propor- tion will imagine that such treatment is first in importance. Engage the social sciences if you will as caterers to your aesthetic demands; but have the decency when you do so to list them where they belong — in the class with the dance and the drama. Again, as I have observed, it is very hard to get attention to social science beyond the demands of school curricula. Far be it from me to belittle the educational uses of social science. It seems to me as inevitable as it is desirable that all our education, from the kindergarten up, must grow more and more sociological in a sense derived from that in which I used the term in connection ^with religion. Our schooling will increase in value in proportion as it sophisticates us in the literal processes of life. But after all how naive THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 283 and partial our knowledge of any social reality is at best, even after we have received all that the schools can give! A forenoon in an editorial office or a grand jury room or a directors' meet- ing, an evening in a precinct caucus or a city council or a state or national legislature, would be below the average in action, if it did not con- tain enough that he had never thought of to make the most intelligent Doctor of Philosophy in social science conscious of gaps in his knowledge. The academic phases of social science are valu- able not so much for the information about life which they impart, as for the ability to learn about life which they develop, and for the con- viction of the importance of finding out about life which they stimulate. Social science would be little more than mental gymnastics for ado- lescents if its pedagogical uses contained its chief value. No ! Social science is not an adolescent but an adult function! We are just beginning to emerge from the semi-conscious juvenile stage of social self- knowledge. We have taken many hasty and partial inventories of social assets. We have ventured numerous limited social experiments. Some of these have been rash, some timid, all relatively superficial. They have revealed no large 284 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE mature conception of social destiny. If they have been occasionally ambitious and general in their proclamations, they have at the same time been vague and fatuous in their details. Our con- temporary social science as a whole roughly re- sembles the individual consciousness of the typical college boy three months after graduation. The glamor of being a Senior has passed into the gloom of doubt about ability to get a grip on the world. The general life of men which from the undergraduate standpoint seemed a stupid sim- plicity, to be settled with in a few patronizing phrases, has become complex and unwieldy. It is big, puzzling, and noncommittal. It has not yet fairly dawned on the thought of the world that human Hfe is not an affair of a few homely classifications. To be born; to be nursed from a puling babe to a bawling brat; to be taught the commonplace lore of life; to find one's job; to mate; to propagate one's kind; to keep up the motions of one's group; to gather a few passing gratifications; to die — ^these are not the dimensions of human destiny. Men are in at the early stages of an enter- prise which has no limits that human knowl- edge can discover. Certain hither landmarks we can fix, but the outbound movement of human THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 285 experience projects an orbit that we have no power to calculate. The human race has a material endowment which is beyond our means of appraisal. We have developed a fairly prophetic technique for extracting nature's wealths. We have sampled the treasures at our command, and we have assured ourselves that completer control of them is within our reach. These supplies, these mate- rials, these energies, these efficiencies are the social inheritance, along with the rudimentary apparatus, from alphabet and multiplication table to our engineerings and our traffickings and our legislatings, by which we have conducted our- selves thus far in our pioneering. In a meager way too we have tried out per- sonal capacities. We have taken preliminary measures of bodily strength and skill. We have shown ability to endure and to perform up to certain marks. In like casual fashion we have tested sample men's intellectual competence. We have gained certain provisional experiences about what men can do with their minds when they devote them- selves to mental effort. We have achieved cer- tain grades of mental value of many types, from Euclid to Edison, from Aesculapius to Koch, from Homer to Goethe. 286 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE More than this, we have discovered moral strengths. We have not only learned in our life apprenticeship that certain qualities of conduct which we call virtues are good for those who have the use of them, but we have found that men actually have it in them to achieve these qualities. Men may be patient, and industrious, and strenuous, and dependable, and considerate, and tolerant, and steadfast, and generous, and enterprising. They may not only develop these values to a degree that cements family relations and harmonizes community intercourse, but in some men one or more of these values may be so large that they bless races, nations, generations. We have even made beginnings in social achievement in the strict sense. We have dis- covered rudimentary abilities to co-operate. We have found ourselves justifying ourselves to ourselves when we have formed large and dur- able associations. We have found our horizon widening and the measure of realization enlar- ging as we have become members one of another in more elaborate interdependencies. We have discovered that values which we prize may be gained by men in organization which could not be achieved by men as individuals. "And it doth not yet appear what we shall be!" In youthful exuberance, stimulated by THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 287 some of these first samples from the vintage of human experience, men have pictured Utopias as the goal of social endeavor. This is the world's Sophomorism. Not Utopia-painting but' social edification is the task of maturing men ; \ and ^ocial science7Ts the methodologyjof that / task. Our human situation indicates not the duty of fitting our conduct into certain pre- ordained categories, but the opportunity to work out the possibilities latent in the resources which we have sampled. Our outlook is over an uncharted future in which men may employ their intelligence more and more economically to realize the attain- able in all the directions into which our experi- ence thus far has given us glimpses. It is not men's business to determine in advance what manner of men or what type of society will be ultimate. It is our destiny to conserve those human values which we are at present able to appreciate, and to combine our energies to the end of refining those values and making them more general, while we continue the immemorial pro- cess of discovering and realizing further values If a sound, strong, skilful body is good for anyone, there can be no social wisdom which slights the basic businesses whose function is to secure the conditions of life in which sound, 288 THE MEANING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE Strong, skilful bodies will be the rule for the largest possible proportion of men and women. If intellectual force, and grasp, and poise, and penetration are good for anybody, they must be counted as parts of the outfit with which it must be the program of life to equip as fully as possible steadily increasing quotas of human beings. If the qualities that we call virtues, the dis- positions and the attitudes toward one another in which men recognize one another's worth and respond to one another's needs, are good for anybody, then it is an abortive human condition in which these qualities are exceptional. It is a state of arrested development if these human values are mostly dissociated, some achieved by one individual, some by another, and seldom harmoniously constructed into a single person- ality. Life will begin to be mature only when these elements of human value are relatively universal. Our human task is therefore, in one more detail, intelligent cultivation of the basic virtues. And this implies that human wisdom must compass the means within men's reach of establishing conditions most favorable to the development of the basic virtues. If all this and this only were provided for literally in accordance with the schedule, men THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE 289 would still be merely in the pre-creative stage of social destiny. It would be the period of nebu- lous star-stuff, unformed and void, before the atoms had begun to arrange themselves into worlds. Fortunately men come to consciousness in a^ later evolutionary stage than this. We know nothing of an utterly non-social condition. So far as our knowledge goes men are never literally individuals. Within narrower or wider diam- eters they are always dependents on one another, and even in some degree functions of one another. The social task is at last to find the ut- most attainable terms of this human interdepend- ence^ B£L^^ !iH?iJ^^l^P^ ^Ht ^^ ^D^l^^v^^^t. How may we 9 ff. Wholeness of human experi- ence, 116. Williams, J. M., 211. Witanagemot, 201. Wundt, W., 52, i49> Young, Arthur, 167. Q 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. REC'D ^Wov'635ff REC'D LIJWR14 bc,4 PM NOV 6 '63 -3 '»f f» i 1^ \ feb'65MsX J AN 2 5 '65-3 PM ^^968 66 i'^M'65"t> •s-r-K, v/gT 7. JUL 2 1 '68 - i r RECP LD LOAN DEP- -. wreis^^sTR JAU 1 5 13^^ - ^, APR 1 5 )977 3 lEaClR.HI«30 77 LD 21A-40m-4,'63 (D6471sl0)476B General Library University of California Berkeley COailMOSMI 02^5"/ 3^ S7 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY