appraisals of what has gone on in the world, and is now occurring, and may conceivably take place in the future, tend to correspond with their estimate of its importance for the human beings who are affected. But these people represent more than themselves. They really express the common note of desire throughout the whole course of human thinking. Back of all the obscurities and abstractions and mystifications into which thought has wandered, is the persistent question, What does it all mean for men? The interest behind this question is bound sooner or later to adjust the perspective of all science and to work as the last available measure of value for all supposed knowledge.

Whatever else may or may not be true about it, sociology, as pursued in the United States during the past quarter-century, is an incident in this clearing of vision about what is worth while in science, and why it is worth while. The people who named themselves sociologists are by no means the only persons who have veered toward this center of attention. If they had been, there would be much less meaning in their work. Among thinkers of every name there has been observed or unobserved, conscious or unconscious shifting of perspective. There has been progressive perception that, since we are human beings, the utmost interpretation which we can get of everything that can come into our experience must remain at best merely the meaning which we can discover from our limited outlook as human beings. At the same time we have progressed toward reality in another dimension by the corresponding perception that the worth of all things in our final estimate must get its rating from the standards of measurement which reflect the scale of values in the course of evolution in the consciousness of human beings. To express it more generally, the final scientific problem is to ascertain the ratio of value for human experience of every factor which may enter into that experience.

This conclusion may be taken as a summary of all that would be found in an exact inventory of that uncertain quantity which we call "modern thought." It is the substance of that apparition to which the recent papal rescripts refer as "modernism." In brief, those things are significant for men which have a meaning

for the evolving experience of men, and in the precise ratio of their ascertained influence upon the process of that experience.

From this point of view two primary judgments sooner or later assert themselves; first, the unit of our knowledge of experience must be the experiencing person, the human individual; second, as the experiencing person is not a phenomenon existing in a vacuum, as the human individual lives and moves and has his being by virtue of reactions with surroundings, it is of co-ordinate importance that our knowledge of the experiencing person shall be built up by organizing it with progressive knowledge of all the conditions which are the objective side of his experience.

areas.

This outlook fixes two areas as the chief planes of vision for modern science. It foreshadows progressive rearrangement of our knowledge and pursuit of knowledge with reference to these To schedule one of them as primary and the other as secondary would be to relapse into an archaic logic. We have to think of two complex systems of factors at work in every passage of experience. These are on the one hand the acting person, on the other hand the conditions of his activity. That is, as a matter of working necessity we are forced to treat every problem of experience as an affair of the interworkings of two main groups of factors, persons, on the one hand, and the conditions under which personal activity operates, on the other.

This division gives us the finding marks of the modern phase of scientific investigation. On the one hand it is essentially psychological. Expressed in everyday words, it goes out to learn the makeup of persons. What is a person? How does he get into action? What decides how he shall act? What finally appraises the value of his acts? On the other hand, it is essentially physical. It brings into focus the universe which surrounds persons, of which on the one side persons are involuntary parts, which furnishes on the other side the bounds and also the fulcra of all personal activity. The situation so considered must be treated as a realm of relations which appear to be of a different order from the relations that we classify as personal.

There are hypercritics who set themselves up as sentinels at

this point and challenge the right of peaceful scientific noncombatants to advance unless they give an account of themselves in unequivocally monistic language. People who are more interested in progress of objective analysis than in verbal purism must waste no ceremony in brushing these pedants aside. Whatever the strength of our belief in an ultimate oneness, our daily contacts are with situations composed of factors which we have to treat as dissimilar. In our present state of knowledge we have to move forward toward more knowledge by calculating as well as our means permit the interrelations between the two types of factors which we may call for convenience, the factors of choice and the factors of force.

Admitting the lack of precision in this summary way of outlining the main problem of knowledge, the practical fact is that the trunk line of advance toward better understanding of the things of most concern to men is clearing the way in this fashion; and academic science must eventually conform. Men want to understand first and last men's being, men's doings, and men's destinies. With apologies to Pope, the inevitable study of mankind is manness. Accordingly our audit of accounts with supposed knowledge is bound to pry more and more into the finality of our discoveries in two directions, and into the credibility of our interpretations of the relations between supposed discoveries under these two aspects: viz., what are the realities and the meanings of those activities which we have to think of as originating in men themselves, and what are the realities and the meanings of those activities which we have to think of as converging in and upon men, and making up their external conditions?

In the rough, if this formal requisition had been set up when men began to search for knowledge, it would have given us, as the first grouping of knowledge, our traditional classification into the human and the physical sciences. How long we shall continue to find this classification convenient, it would be profitless to ask. The cardinal point now is that, wherever thought is relatively free, there is an evidently growing disposition to assert independence of all scholastic tradition, beyond this primary and

obvious division for working purposes, whenever and to the extent that tradition virtually sets up sciences delimited by a priori conditions and classified as having an intrinsic and independent value. The protestantism which we call the sociological movement is fundamentally, and in part consciously and overtly, a declaration of faith that the closest approach to ultimate organization of knowledge which finite intelligence can ever reach must be a formulation of the relations of all alleged knowledge to the central process of human experience.

It

The general meaning of the sociological movement then is that it is the outward and visible sign of this invisible grace. is giving new voice and force to this deepest of human strivings, the quest of self-knowledge. Poetry, mysticism, religion, science, political agitation, philanthropy, each in a thousand variations of its own peculiar oratio obliqua, has participated in this quest. Most of the sociologists were drawn as blindly and halfdiscerningly into the pursuit as the majority of like-minded thinkers past and present who have had their center in other groups. They are slowly arriving at qualifying self-consciousness. They are gradually adjusting their vision to the perception that in the last analysis there is but one conceivable human measure of value: viz., the meaning which the thing valued has for the prevailing conception of the whole system of human purposes. The intellectual side of this perception is that there is at last but one conceivable human test of alleged knowledge: viz., the kind and degree of its congruence with the rest that is supposed to be known about human experience.

In brief, then, the sociological movement is made up of the more or less conscious attempts to concentrate all our means of knowledge upon the task of interpreting human experience, its past, its present, its future, so far as past and present can project vision into the future.

It is not easy to convince anyone who has not long looked at things in this way that these propositions express anything beyond the commonplace. Is it not impudent to imply that interpretation of human experience has anything to gain from an upstart in social science? The whole series of historians, for example,

from Herodotus to the latest producer of a doctor's dissertation, has devoted itself to nothing else but human experience.

In a sense this is true. It may also be true that, for every sociologist who could be named, many historians might be mentioned who in their way have contributed more to knowledge of human experience. It would doubtless continue to be true that the sort of work done by historians would remain indispensible, even if it should turn out that the sort of work proposed by the sociologists is more vital. All these things, however, are aside from the point. The case for the sociologists may be compared with the relation of modern pathologists to the entire series of medical practitioners, from Galen to the era of Pasteur and Virchow. For thousands of years the medicine men had been dealing with diseases. Not until the pathologists developed their methods was there reliable study of disease. The case of the historians is strictly analogous, to the extent that they are satisfied with the application of a technique, and do not push its results into interpretation of the whole human process. Narrating the fortunes of nations and other institutions is logically at precisely the same remove from interpretation of the human beings who make and are made by the institutions, as description of their clothing or the cut of their hair. Either of these incidentals may be used for what it is worth in analysis of the persons who were expressing themselves by means of the incidentals. It is not at all certain, however, that a given study of a phase of human activities will go so far as to correlate itself with its essential center. It may stop and assert itself as virtually apart from the paramount human process. It may fail to find its place in the evolution of that manness which is the continuous principle in the whole process of experience. It may fail to translate its items of knowledge in terms of man's progressive self-expression, in which events and institutions are thrown off as by-products. It is certain that no study of phases of human experience will yield its utmost for final knowledge of the experiencing. persons, unless the people who pursue it adjust themselves to two conceptions, viz., first that the types of persons evolving into being through