incomplete. Some people would have made out one range of relationships, other people would have made out another range of relationships, but neither would be able to account for the relationships which they would be obliged to think of as existing between the two aspects of reality. But our limitations are much closer than this. Not to speak further of relations presumed to be purely physical, nor of relations which we treat as blendings of the physical and the mental-such as all that now eludes our search in the zone of relationships between heredity and personality, or everything like the connection between climate or digestion, for instance, and mental states-there remain in the realm of relationships between historical tradition and contemporary interests, between culture and economics and politics, between social strata, between races and nations and civilizations, immeasurable masses and intricacies of facts and interrelations which it is desirable to bring under the aspect of "science." The first step toward that achievement should be recognition and admission that only the most distant approaches have thus far been made to that consummation. All that we call "social science" in any of its divisions-anthropology, history, psychology, politics, economics, sociology, etc., etc.-is relatively inchoate, relatively fragmentary, relatively insulated. Reasons for this are not far to seek. The range of human phenomena is so wide, the interweavings of human relations are so complicated, that we may easily lose ourselves in contemplation of aspects of them, and become unable to entertain the idea that the aspects in which we are chiefly interested are not sufficient unto themselves. We elaborate programs of investigating these detached aspects of human experience, and we presently become convinced that our procedure with this excerpt from reality is "science." Our procedure may be orderly and valid as far as it goes. In that degree and in that sense it is "science"; but it is nevertheless fractional and impotent. It ends merely in vivisection of reality, not in revivifying reality. Characteristic of the pseudo-scientific state of mind in which this partialism leaves us, is failure to apprehend even the most general relations between cardinal divisions of our rudimentary social science. In a recent official publication one of our leading universities perpetrates the collocation-"history and social science." If the science of people had cut its wisdom teeth, that monstrosity would be as impossible as "algebra and mathematics." The naïveté which permitted it reminds us of the catalogue of a certain southern college which thirty years ago carried in its faculty list the item: " Professor of History, Ancient and Natural." In his book, The Mind in the Making, the historian James Harvey Robinson has this definition of a term: "Rationalizing is the self-exculpation which occurs when we feel ourselves, or our group, accused of misapprehension or error" (p. 44). He continues (p. 47): "And now the astonishing and perturbing suspicion emerges that perhaps almost all that has passed for social sciencepolitical economy, politics, and ethics-in the past, may be brushed aside by future generations as mainly rationalizing. John Dewey has already reached this conclusion in regard to philosophy.' Veblen' and other writers have revealed the various unperceived presuppositions of the traditional political economy, and now comes an Italian sociologist, Vilfredo Pareto, who, in his huge treatise on general sociology, devotes hundreds of pages to substantiating a similar thesis affecting all the social sciences.3 This conclusion may be ranked by students of a hundred years hence as one of the several great discoveries of our age. It is by no means fully worked out, and it is so opposed to nature that it will be very slowly accepted by the great mass of those who consider themselves thoughtful. I am personally fully reconciled to this newer view. Indeed, it seems to me inevitable that just as the various sciences of nature were, before the opening of the seventeenth century, largely masses of rationalizations to suit the religious sentiments of the period, so the social sciences have continued even to our own day to be rationalizations of uncritically accepted beliefs and customs. "It will become apparent as we proceed that the fact that an idea is ancient and that it has been widely received is no argument in its * Reconstruction in Philosophy. The Place of Science in Modern Civilization. 3 Traité de Sociologie Générale, passim. favor, but should immediately suggest the necessity of carefully testing it as a probable instance of rationalization." It would be a long step toward objectivity or positivity or "science" in the ultimate sense, if all who now call themselves social scientists of any sort would agree not to speak of their pursuits as "sciences" but would refer to them less pretentiously as techniques. To begin with, it would force us into self-criticism of our various techniques. If we should tell ourselves the full truth about the condition of our working plants, there would be a flood of voluntary scientific bankruptcies. It would be a further step if we should agree to use the term "social science" consistently as that beginning of federated search after knowledge in which all the techniques that penetrate into phases of the human reality are learning to co-operate. In so far as they are valid and responsible procedures in the pursuit of knowledge, these disciplines are first and foremost techniques only. What they are more, is a question of fact to be determined by inspection in each particular case. What they are more is either the appropriate consequent of the responsibile use of a technique, or it is a meretricious amplification of technical results by assembling around them accumulations from sources which may or may not be of the same rank. For example, a given historian may have employed an appropriate technique upon the sources of evidence pertinent to certain occurrences in the decade 1830–40. He may have relied upon hearsay evidence with reference to certain occurrences in the decades 1770-90. He may have organized his credulity about the earlier period into his technically authenticated findings about the later, and made the combination the nucleus of what he calls the "history" of the period 1770-1870. As we express this fictitious instance for illustration, the illusion is so apparent that it could deceive no one, yet the equivalent of this hypothetical case is one of the most frequent weaknesses in all sorts of writing about human life. In actual practice the fallacy is not so wide open to inspection. It consequently deceives not only the public but the deceivers. In further consequence it has come about ' Robinson here calls attention to a real tendency, but he draws from it an extreme conclusion. I shall state my own modification later. that what has passed as authorative in any one of the divisions of social science, has often been at best a nondescript compound of x parts scientific findings and y parts amateurish padding. Moreover, y may not only be many times in excess of x as to bulk, but it may be made up of variously impertinent elements, from the inertly encumbering to the malignantly corrupting. This course will treat sociology under the aspect of a technique, not as a science. The assertion must be understood throughout that this mode of treatment applies to sociology precisely as it fits each of the other so-called social sciences, no more, no less. No one of these disciplines begins to earn scientific rank until it applies a distinctive method to some aspect of the human reality. That rank is not confirmed until the findings from operation of the method command recognition as necessary to the completion of social science in general. Our business in this course is to explain the essential character of the sociological technique its apparatus and processes cannot be described in detail in the time at our disposal-and to indicate in a general way how understanding of human life may be enlarged by use of this technique in co-operation with the techniques adapted to investigation of phases of the human reality which are aside from the sociological center of attention. NEWS AND NOTES Notes of interest to the readers of the Journal should be in the hands of the editor of "News and Notes" not later than the tenth of the month preceding publication. AMERICAN COUNCIL OF LEARNED SOCIETIES The American Sociological Society was represented at the Annual Meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies held in New York on January 28, 1922, by Professor F. Stuart Chapin of Smith College. Reports of the officers indicated that the publication of the annual bulletin of the Council would have to be delayed owing to the fact that official reports of the annual meeting of the Union Académique had not yet been received. Aside from the slight financial contributions which the Council had been able to make toward the support of international undertakings, the chief interest of the Council centered about a proposal to study the ways and means of beginning a Dictionary of National Biography. It was agreed that America had need of such a publication and that the Council was the logical agency to initiate the enterprise. A committee was appointed to investigate and report. An arrangement has been made with the National Research Council for collaboration in reporting doctor's dissertations on subjects within the fields of learning covered by the constituent societies. A committee was appointed to consider the proposal of establishing a business corporation for organizing along lines of modern business efficiency the distribution and sales of journals published by the constituent societies. This proposal was made by the representative of a large New York publishing house. A representative from the Council was elected to serve as a director of the University Center of Research of Washington, D. C. AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL SOCIETY President James P. Lichtenberger announces the appointment of Professor Edward Cary Hayes, University of Illinois, and Professor Ross L. Finney, University of Minnesota, as representatives of the American Sociological Society upon the joint committee on social studies in the public schools. This comittee is constituted by representatives from the social science associations. The Papers and Proceedings of the sixteenth annual meeting of the American Sociological Society held at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Decem |