SOCIAL SCIENCE
DRAMATIC CHARACTER OF THE SCIENCES OF LIFE—SPECIAL CHARACTER OF
SOCIOLOGY—NUMERICAL EXACTNESS NOT ITS IDEAL—QUALIFICATIONS OF A
SOCIOLOGIST—PRACTICAL VALUE OF SOCIOLOGY
We have seen that social intelligence is essentially an imaginative
grasp of the process going on about us, enabling us to carry this
forward into the future and anticipate how it will work. It is a
dramatic vision by which we see how the agents now operating must
interact upon one another and issue in a new situation. How shall we
apply this idea to social science? Shall we say that that too is
dramatic?
There would be nothing absurd in such a view. All science may be said to
work by a dramatic method when it takes the results of minute
observation and tries to build them into fresh wholes of knowledge.
This, we know, takes creative imagination; the intelligence must act in
sympathy with nature and foresee its operation. The work on the
evolution of life for which Darwin is most famous may justly be
described as an attempt to dramatize what mankind had come to know about
plants and animals. He took the painfully won details and showed how
they contributed to a living process whose operation could be traced in
the past, and possibly anticipated for the future. And, indeed, so
homogeneous is life, the phases he found in this process—divergence,
struggle, adaptation—are much the same as have always been recognized in
the drama.
Darwin regarded the study of fossils as a means to the better
understanding of life upon earth, as a way to _see what is going on_,
and in like manner the precise observation of individuals and families
in sociology is preparatory to a social synthesis whose aim also is to
see what is going on.
The routine conception of science as _merely_ precise study of details
is never a sound one, and is particularly barren in the social field. If
we are to arrive at principles or have any success at all in prediction
we must keep the imagination constantly at work. And even in detailed
studies we must dramatize more or less to make the facts intelligible.
An investigator of juvenile delinquency who was not armed with insight
as well as schedules would not report anything of much value.
There are marked differences, however, between biology and sociology,
considered as studies of process, of which I will note especially two.
One is that in biology essential change in types is chiefly slow and not
easily perceptible. For the most part we have to do with a moving
equilibrium of species and modes of life repeating itself generation
after generation. It took a Darwin to show, by comparing remote periods,
that nature was really evolving, dramatic, creative.
In social life, on the other hand, change is obvious and urgent; so that
the main practical object of our science is to understand and control
it. The dramatic element, which in biology is revealed only to a titanic
imagination, becomes the most familiar and intimate thing in experience.
Any real study of society must be first, last, and nearly all the time a
study of process.
Again, the sciences that deal with social life are unique in that we who
study them are a conscious part of the process. We can know it by
sympathetic participation, in a manner impossible in the study of plant
or animal life. Many indeed find this fact embarrassing, and are
inclined to escape it by trying to use only “objective” methods, or to
question whether it does not shut out sociology and introspective
psychology from the number of true sciences.
I should say that it puts these studies in a class by themselves:
whether you call them sciences or something else is of no great
importance. It is their unique privilege to approach life from the point
of view of conscious and familiar partaking of it. This involves unique
methods which must be worked out independently. The sooner we cease
circumscribing and testing ourselves by the canons of physical and
physiological science the better. Whatever we do that is worth while
will be done by discarding alien formulas and falling back upon our
natural bent to observation and reflection. Going ahead resolutely with
these we shall work out methods as we go. In fact sociology has already
developed at least one original method of the highest promise, namely
that of systematic social surveys.
The reason that students of the principles of sociology (as
distinguished from those whose aim is immediately practical) are
somewhat less preoccupied with the digging out of primary facts than
with their interpretation, is simply that, for the present, the latter
is the more difficult task. We have within easy reach facts which, if
fully digested and correlated, would probably be ample to illuminate the
whole subject. It is very much as in political economy, whose principles
have been worked out mainly by the closer and closer study and
interpretation of facts which, as details, every business man knows.
Knowledge requires both observation and interpretation, neither being
more scientific than the other. And each branch of science must be
worked out in its own way, which is mainly to be found in the actual
search for truth rather than by _a priori_ methodology. Sociology has as
ample a field of verifiable fact as any subject, and it is not clear
that the interpretations are more unsettled than they are elsewhere. The
chief reason why it has developed late and still appears uninviting to
many is the very abundance and apparent confusion of the material, which
seems to take away the hope of simple, sure, and lasting results. One
purpose in our study of principles is to restore this hope and give
order to this abundance. And while there are certainly special
difficulties, as in all sciences, our own is coming to afford, I think,
as great intellectual attraction as can be found in other studies, along
with a human and social character peculiar to itself. It will be strange
if an increasing proportion of good minds do not give themselves to it.
While I ascribe the utmost importance to precision in preparing the data
for social science, I do not think its true aim is to bring society
within the sphere of arithmetic. Exact prediction and mechanical control
for the social world I believe to be a false ideal inconsiderately
borrowed from the provinces of physical science. There is no real reason
to think that this sort of prediction or control will ever be possible.
Much has been made of the fact that human phenomena, when studied
statistically on a large scale, often show a marked numerical uniformity
from year to year; and some have even inferred that human spontaneity is
an illusion, and that we are really controlled by mathematical laws as
precise as those which guide the course of the planets. But I take it
that such uniformities as are to be observed in births, marriages,
suicides, and many other human phenomena do not indicate underlying
principles analogous to the laws of gravitation or chemical reaction.
They merely show that under a given social condition the number of
persons who will choose to perform certain definite acts within the year
may remain almost the same, or may be increased or diminished by certain
definite changes, such as the advent of war or economic hardship. They
no more prove that human conduct is subject to numerical law than does
the fact that I eat three meals a day, or that I shall spend more money
if my salary is raised, and less if it is diminished.
In other words statistical uniformities do not show that it is possible
to predict numerically the working of intelligence _in new situations_,
and of course that is the decisive test. Where exact prediction is
possible the whole basis of it I take to be the fact that the general
social situation remains the same, or is changed in ways which do not
involve new problems of choice in the field studied. In short, the more
the question is one of intelligence the less the numerical method can
cope with it.
Uniformity in the suicide rate, so far as it exists, shows that the
causes of suicide, whatever they may be, are operating in about the same
degree from year to year, that the social situation is static, or rather
in moving equilibrium. It reveals no law of suicide beyond the fact that
it is connected in some definite way with the social situation in
general. It does not help you to understand why Saul Jones killed
himself, or to predict whether Jonathan Smith will or not. All you know
is that if the general current of human trouble goes on about the same,
the number of cases is not likely to vary much.
Serious attempts to understand suicide and to predict its prevalence
under various conditions are based, if they are intelligent, upon
psychological theories of an imaginative character. Thus Dürkheim, in
his book upon the subject, develops the idea of “altruistic” suicide,
and enables us to understand how a disgraced army officer, for example,
might be driven to it by social pressure. To such studies statistics is
only an adjunct.
In the case of marriage you may be able to predict with some accuracy
the effect of the simpler sort of economic changes, such as larger or
smaller crops, but, if so, it is because marriage is a familiar problem,
settled in much the same way by one generation after the other, on the
basis of lasting instincts or conventions. You cannot, in the same way,
anticipate the outcome of the next presidential campaign, or of any
other transaction in which the human mind is confronting a fresh
situation.
The only instrument that can in any degree meet the test of prediction,
where new problems of higher choice confront the mind, is the instructed
imagination, which, by a kind of inspired intelligence, may anticipate
within itself the drama of social process, and so foresee the issue.
That this supreme act of the mind, never more than partly successful,
even in the simplest questions, can ever become, on a large scale, sure,
precise, and demonstrable before the event, there is no evidence or
probability. So far as we can now see or infer, social prediction, in
the higher provinces, must ever remain tentative, and I suspect that all
the sciences which deal with the life process are subject to a similar
limitation. Darwin’s suggestion regarding the “free will” of the
dinosaur would seem to indicate that this was his opinion.[82]
Intelligent social prediction is contradictory to determinism, because,
instead of ignoring the creative will, it accepts it and endeavors by
sympathy to enter into it and foresee its working. If I predict an
artistic or humanitarian movement, it is partly because I feel as if I
myself, with whatever freedom and creative power is in me, would choose
to share in such a movement.
The possibility of social science rests upon the hypothesis that social
life is in some sense rational and sequent. It has been assumed that
this can be true only if it is mechanically calculable. But there may
easily be another sort of rationality and sequence, not mechanical,
consistent with a kind of freedom, which makes possible an organized
development of social knowledge answering to the organic character of
the social process. The life of men has a unity and order of its own,
which may or may not prove to be the same in essence as that which rules
the stars. It seems to include a creative element which must be grasped
by the participating activity of the mind rather than by computations.
How far it can be known and predicted is a matter for trial. The right
method is the one that may be found to give the best results. Apparently
it is not, except in subordinate degree, the numerical method.
A sociologist must have the patient love of truth and the need to reduce
it to principles which all men of science require. Besides this,
however, he needs the fullest sympathy and participation in the currents
of life. He can no more stand aloof than can the novelist or the poet,
and all his work is, in a certain sense, autobiographic. I mean that it
is all based on perceptions which he has won by actual living. He should
know his groups as Mr. Bryce came to know America, with a real intimacy
due to long and considerate familiarity with individuals, families,
cities, and manifold opinions and traditions. He cannot be a specialist
in the same way that a chemist or a botanist can, because he cannot
narrow his life without narrowing his grasp of his subject. To attempt
to build up sociology as a technical tradition remote from the great
currents of literature and philosophy, would, in my opinion, be a fatal
error. It cannot avoid being difficult, but it should be as little
abstruse as possible. If it is not human it is nothing.
I have often thought that, in endowment, Goethe was almost the ideal
sociologist, and that one who added to more common traits his
comprehension, his disinterestedness and his sense for organic unity and
movement might accomplish almost anything.
The method of social improvement is likely to remain experimental, but
sociology is one of the means by which the experimentation becomes more
intelligent. I think, for example, that any one who studies the theory
of social classes—the various kinds, the conditions of their formation
and continuance, their effect in moulding the minds of those who belong
to them, and the like—using what has been written upon the subject to
stimulate his own observation and reflection, will find that the
contemporary situation is illumined for him and his grasp of the trend
of events enhanced.
By observation and thought we work out generalizations which help us to
understand where we are and what is going on. These are “principles of
sociology.” They are similar in nature to principles of economics, and
aid our social insight just as these aid our insight into business or
finance. They supply no ready-made solutions but give illumination and
perspective. A good sociologist might have poor judgment in philanthropy
or social legislation, just as a good political economist might have
poor judgment in investing his money. Yet, other things equal, the mind
trained in the theory of its subject will surpass in practical wisdom
one that is not.
At bottom any science is simply a more penetrating perception of facts,
gained largely by selecting those that are more universal and devoting
intensive study to them—as biologists are now studying the great fact of
hereditary transmission. In so far as we know these more general facts
we are the better prepared to work understandingly in the actual
complexities of life. Our study should enable us to discern underneath
the apparent confusion of things the working of enduring principles of
human nature and social process, simplifying the movement for us by
revealing its main currents, something as a general can follow the
course of a battle better by the aid of a map upon which the chief
operations are indicated and the distracting details left out. This will
not assure our control of life, but should enable us to devise measures
having a good chance of success. And in so far as they fail we should be
in a position to see what is wrong and do better next time.
I think, then, that the supreme aim of social science is to perceive the
drama of life more adequately than can be done by ordinary observation.
If it be objected that this is the task of an artist—a Shakespeare, a
Goethe, or a Balzac—rather than of a scientist, I may answer that an
undertaking so vast requires the co-operation of various sorts of
synthetic minds; artists, scientists, philosophers, and men of action.
Or I may say that the constructive part of science is, in truth, a form
of art.
Indeed one of the best things to be expected from our study is the power
of looking upon the movement of human life in a large, composed spirit,
of seeing it in something of ideal unity and beauty.