social situation which Germans confronted after the Napoleonic period. This situation presented itself to Germans of practice and theory alike under two chief aspects, namely, first the economic and second the political. Under each of these aspects specific problems of immediate importance pressed for solution. The thesis which does most to disclose the treasures of instruction to be uncovered in the period then beginning is this: The theoretical and practical experience forced upon Germans by their situation compelled them to an inspection of social cause and effect which at last resulted in scientific and practical objectivity in a plane at right angles with the plane of historical objectivity.

This result was slow and through intermediate steps which have not yet been distinctly traced; but certain groups of processes are evident. On the one hand, the economic element in cameralism was so prominent that tradition up to the present time has treated that element as paramount. In fact, as I have pointed out, the political element in cameralism was principal, and the economic factor tributary. During the cameralistic period, however, pragmatic treatment of economic activities was unconsciously paving the way for economic science as we now understand the phrase. In particular, those divisions of cameralistic technique which worked out inventories and population rolls and tax lists were precursors of statistical methods and statistical science. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, under the preceptorship of Rau, the Germans were actually enrolled in the school of Adam Smith for generalized study of economic phenomena. In the minds of practical men and theorists alike, the immediately stimulating problem was: "How may the Germans become economically prosperous?" The big methodological fact about what followed was this: In the course of the century, German economic thought tried out in turn the classical, the historical, the "Austrian," and the socio-political ways of approaching economic generalizations. Whatever the specific conclusions, the universal result was uniformity of attempt to settle economic problems by valid reference of effects to their causes, by candid recognition that economic situations are reflections of contemporary as well as antecedent conditions. Translated into methodological terms,

this means, as I have said, that all the German economists had come to think of economic cause and effect not only under the aspect of before and after, but also under the aspect of coexisting action and reaction: or in a word functionally.

This common factor in German economic method is as general today, in spite of particular appearances to the contrary, as a certain common attitude among several million American voters who divided themselves among the parties in the recent national election. The members of this divided group voted in principle together; only in the application of the principle were they separate. Each subdivision of the group convinced itself that the man of its preference was the only candidate who was really born under the constellation of progress. There is much more unanimity among German economists today on the principle that economic relations must be judged at last by their workings than among the actually advancing element among American voters today as to who and what is progressive.

Meanwhile the second great factor in nineteenth-century German experience made its characteristic contribution to this functional preconception. I have designated it as the political factor. As I am now thinking of this influence it included all the activities of the plain people, of statesmen and their subordinates, and of academic theorists, with the status of public and private law as their center of attention. In some aspects it might better be called the juridical factor. Here the problem of interpretation on the practical side has to do with the whole process of social liberation along the lines foreshadowed in the Stein-Hardenberg reforms, in the struggles for constitutionalism, in the realization of imperial unity in 1871, and in the subsequent elaboration of the imperial code. On the theoretical side it has to do with a wide gamut of actors. They range from the brood of petifogging legalists, the men whose horizon was bounded by precedent and formula applied not even after the spirit but mechanically after the letter, through such intelligent systematizers of the law as Hugo, such historically minded searchers for the sources of the law as Savigny, to the abstract extreme of philosophy of law as represented by Hegel; and the scale then runs to the gradual develop

ment of an objective philosophy of law as typified by Jellinek.1 The force of external events, much more than developments from within, inexorably transformed this juridical element in German social science. Little by little the more far-seeing theorists on the political side were compelled to think of political institutions as machineries devised by men to serve developing human purposes. Expressed from the other side, they were forced to give up the illusion that political institutions are unalterable reflections of absolute principles. The most vital idea associated with this incipient functional conception of civic institutions was again the implication that they must be judged by their works.

I do not assert that German political science today has explicitly adopted abstract formulas of the functional character of life in general, and of civic institutions in particular, which would satisfy the sociologists. My claim is that the current literature of German political science is cast in a mold which in a marked degree presupposes, and to a certain extent expresses, the functional conception. As a typical case, I would refer again to Jellinek's volume just cited, and particularly to chap. iv, "The Relationship between Civic Theory and the Totality of the Sciences."

We must glance now at the third theoretical factor effective in this period. For want of a better name I have called it the sociological factor. I mean by it the phase of social science particularly represented by this society. It has fought its way into academic recognition during the past twenty-five years, in spite of inveterate prejudice that it was unheard of, and not desirable to be heard of, in the scientific world. If the historical training of the present generation of social scientists had been more complete they could not have made the former claim; and if their methodological knowledge had been more broad they would have been ashamed to make the latter. In a word the sociological factor in social science is the effort to visualize all the phases of human experience in their functional relations with one another, and to promote inquiry into all divisions of human experience with adequate attention to the interdependence of their functions. Whether this factor in social science is desirable or not, it is irrepressible unless we set arbitrary 1 Allgemeine Staatslehre, Vol. I, 1900.

bounds to the working of our minds. Instead of being a parvenue of recent date, the sociological approach to the interpretation of experience was very pronounced in such men as Gerhard in 1713,1 and Zincke in 1751.2 At the middle of the nineteenth century a number of German scholars, who were sociologists in everything but name, projected reconsideration of human experience along lines which testified to relatively advanced insight into the functional nature of society. That the sociological factor did not develop rapidly until later is not because it is a superfluity in science, but because it had to overcome the inertia of scientists.

Not all that is obvious, still less all that is discoverable, from the historical and functional centers of attention, was to be brought to light by casual and semiconscious reference. The task demanded someone's specialized labor until a new rendering of experience becomes possible in terms of the new elements verified from the changed points of view. With more or less consciousness of their task, men whose successors adopted the name "sociologist" enlisted to develop a method and a technique appropriate to these new emphases. Whether or not it is proper to speak of their work as a distinct science is a needless question. It is true that their work was as inevitable in the progress of the social sciences as the work of the evidence-collectors and critics who had gone before. It is a work which must necessarily revolutionize previous results in social science, and it is already revolutionizing them as visibly as the objective conception of historicity revolutionized the homiletical type of history which came over from the eighteenth century into the nineteenth. In particular, it is no longer possible for gentlemen who call themselves by some sectarian scientific name to be taken seriously by completely conscious scholars when they assume that the traditions of their scientific sect are authority enough for the selections of objects of attention which they please to make. We now know that the interests of a conventionalized type of workers cannot say the final word about the objects of attention which are worthy of scientific notice. The whole movement of human experience, in so far as that movement has revealed its meaning up to the 1 Cf. Small, The Cameralists, pp. 175 f. Ibid., pp. 250 f. 3 Cf. Amer. Jour. Sociol., September, 1912, pp. 201 f.

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present time, must be the arbiter of values when we choose to center our attention upon details within the movement. If we are to be veracious, we may not exercise an arbitrary choice about the items which we shall put in evidence when we are trying to reconstruct the processes that have actually occurred in human experience. In the long run the factors that function most meaningly in the objective processes of life must figure in corresponding proportion in scientific interpretation of life. If individuals elect to resign the work of serious interpretation, and to seek their own private amusement through dilettantish trifling with the materials or the technique of knowledge, or if they prefer to cater to the entertainment of the public by fanciful and arbitrary construction of some of those materials into forms detached from the whole reality, they are exercising the same legal rights which permit vaudeville performers to pursue their avocations. If they aim to have a part in the work of interpreting human experience as it actually has been, and is, and is to be, their own tastes may no more dictate their objects of attention than those of a biologist when he is attempting to run down the antecedents of a mysterious disease, or when he is attempting to devise means for promoting eugenics. The decision as to program in either case must be rendered finally not by types of acquired tastes, developed in the investigator by a conventional training, but regardless of the preferences of the individual or of his scientific caste, the problems which he must tackle are questions of the kind and degree of work done in the process in question by the several factors which have co-operated for its results. In short, human experience is growing more and more articulate, and it more distinctly utters its protest against misrepresentation through versions which dismember the whole and then present the dismembered parts as the reality.

The mid-century sociological movement in Germany was not independent of similar movements, those in France and England especially, but it will prove to be peculiarly significant when it is explained in its special relations to the economic and political factors in German experience of which I have spoken. It was a direct consequence of the economic and political discussions of the first half of the century, and of the insight which those discussions had