This paper is virtually a syllabus. It presents a conspectus of a piece of work which cannot be carried far by a single individual. Nevertheless the work is prompted by belief that the aim proposed, the method pursued, tentative results already obtained, and indications to which even these provisional conclusions point, are worth something as a contribution to knowledge, and to the formation of scientific and social purpose.

The study now to be indicated in outline is an inquiry into the methodology of the social sciences, not as it has been or might be developed abstractly, but as it has actually evolved in a single case, that case being regarded as to a certain degree necessarily typical of the logic of the social sciences in general. An important presupposition of the study is that we are far from having exhausted the instruction for present social theory which is to be obtained by study of the evolution of the social sciences.

The study concerns itself directly with the scientific experience of one people only-the Germans. It may be indicated by the question: "What does the evolution of the social sciences in Germany show about actual processes thus far experienced in gaining social sophistication ?"

Address delivered in outline before the American Sociological Society.

I will not defend, but I will explain, this choice of problem. It is doubtless beyond question that, with the single exception of the ethical enlightenment contained in Christianity, the world has learned more in the field of social science since 1800 than it had learned before since Plato. This being the case, it is worth while to study the experience of the Germans in this field during the past century, in the first place, for the general reason that in their experience stages which everyone must somehow pass through in reaching intellectual maturity are more distinctly in evidence than in any other national experience. This is not to assert that the knowledge to be credited to the work of the nineteenth century within the field of the social sciences was all gained by Germans, or that it has been confined to Germany. On the other hand, the intellectual and moral crises in which the limitations of knowledge have become conscious, in which determination to remove the limitations has become deliberate, and in which pursuit of the resolve has arrived at larger outlook and deeper penetration-all these processes have been more visible and in the aggregate more systematically correlated among the Germans than anywhere else.

It may be that scholars among the English, the French, the Italians, and perhaps some of the other nations have actually passed from the eighteenth- to the twentieth-century plane of social enlightenment, on the purely intellectual side, by steps which were quite as independent and which would therefore be quite as instructive as the experience of the Germans. I venture no opinion upon that problem. I simply point out that the waymarks of the German progress are more easily detected and more variously attested. They are not as well preserved as we might wish, but, as compared with the memorabilia of other nations, they are as an intimate daily diary in contrast with those details of an ordinary life which would find place in public annals.

In other words, the Germans have put on record a relatively complete intellectual autobiography. Not because it is German, but because it is human, because it records the experience through which all men's minds have to find their way in order to arrive at our present stage of social sophistication, this German autobiography is the most voluminous introduction in existence to the

particular type of self-knowledge that is taking shape in the modern social sciences. It is a commonplace that we do not fully know what we know, until we know it as it was gradually discovered in the process of eliminating previous misconceptions or of filling gaps where there had been no conceptions. For this reason review of the thought-processes involved in the evolution of German social theories is invaluable.

More specifically, I find it worth while to study the progress of German knowledge in social science since 1800, second, because of the literal exhibit which this experience contains of advance in awareness that supposed facts which had satisfied might not even be facts, and if they were, they would not be sufficient; in awareness that previous solutions did not solve; that previous explanations did not explain; and that previous valuations did not convince. I find it worth while to study the expansion and deepening of German social science, not as the only textbook in which social science may be learned, but as the textbook in which the pragmatic process of learning social science is more explicitly exhibited than in any other available. Otherwise expressed, this German experience presents to us the plainest instance extant on a large scale of social science knowledge in the making. If this were the whole story, it would be reason enough for studying this German experience.

But there is a third reason for studying the nineteenth-century evolution of German social science, and in my rating it is far more important than either of the two just stated, namely, the history either does or does not furnish a series of confirmations of a cardinal theorem in social psychology: Every social theory, and every type of social science is a function of practical problems which contemporary men are attempting to solve. In other words, the thinkers of a generation are tackling in more abstract form the problems with which their whole society at the same time is busy in the concrete. The theories of scholars reflect the personal interest and the class bias of one or other of the groups that clash in the practical competitions of the same period. As these classes arrive at adjustments of their interests, as social institutions settle into arrangements accordingly, the corresponding theories become respectively orthodox and authoritative, or discredited and rejected. Domi

nant dogmas in social science may accordingly be in effect the decrees of non-scientific men who have won social power by some kind of force not purely intellectual, and the dogmas may therefore have no better permanent right than that of might. The prevalent basic presumptions in the theory of economic distribution make a case in point, as I shall indicate later.

In other words, one of the reasons why social theories are not impartially objective is that in every age of the world social theory has been one of the weapons of the class conflict then waging. Whether with conscious or unconscious class bias, the thinkers have been trying to solve the social problems of their time by assuming as self-evident more or less of one or another partisan conception of life then trying conclusions in the arena of social struggle. Social theory has been an ally now of one party, now of another, in the constant social conflict, instead of being an impartial observer in the white light of dispassionate science.

We discover this vitiation of knowledge better in the past than in its manifestations in our own time. More precisely, if we make out this inexactness in our own time, the very perception is discounted by the possibility that our discovery is merely our own partisanship, bringing suspicion of improper bias against other partisans. We are much less liable to that charge when we point out the partisan preconceptions of men in the past, since there is less common interest between ourselves and partisans on either side of past conflicts than there is between ourselves and some living actors. We may therefore more conveniently learn the workings of men's minds when engaged on social problems in general, by analyzing their mode of dealing with stages of social theory which are now closed incidents.

The Germans are neither sinners above all others, in the matters just pointed out, nor are they exceptions to the rule. They have very strikingly illustrated the rule. Their experience, therefore, which as I have said is more plainly recorded than any other of equal scope, is the most instructive available evidence as to this ever-present human factor in knowledge processes.

In the fourth place, the actual growth of social science in Germany presents a specific case of the interdependence of different

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phases of social theory, or, as it is more customary to express it, of the dependence of one social science upon all the others. In the United States the workers in the various social sciences have not yet very generally admitted this interdependence, and those who have admitted it have usually done so with such reserve that the perception has had much less than its full value as a working influence on their methods. The idea that no part of social science can progress very far at a time unless all parts of social science are advancing at the same time, and unless each part is keeping step with all the rest-this idea is still fighting for its life. Few scholars in the United States deny it outright, but few make it a part of their effective beliefs. A large part of the difference between dead scholarship and live scholarship in the social sciences of today consists in contrasted degrees of the vitality of this perception in different men's thinking. There is no clearer proof that objectivity and virility in social science depend upon actual evolution of social science as unified interpretation of a total human experience, than the nineteenth-century history of German social theory. I do not mean that many Germans made the generalization which I have stated, and acted consistently with it. I mean that the work which the narrowest German specialist did got its permanent rating in social science by serving or not serving to close some gap, or to improve some process, which had previously been defective throughout the range of the social sciences. This service as a subsidiary to social science in general is the final criterion of all presumed achievement in any division of social science.

The battle for the triumph of this perception is now on in the United States. The intellectual history of the next generation in our country will be a triumphal march or a disgraceful countermarch according as it succeeds or not in making this perception a commonplace in social science thinking. The line of advance in social science must follow a path to which this perception of the interconnection of all parts of human experience is one of the indexes. I am acquainted with no more immediately available equipment for this part of the impending struggle than familiarity with the facts in the case of German experience in the nineteenth century. That experience is all the more instructive because it was