THE VINDICATION OF SOCIOLOGY 9
Meanwhile, when we have to argue with the order of intelli- gence which cannot rise above the can-of-preserves conception, we need not go to Europe for material for the ad hominem argument. People who cannot understand the reconstructive pointings from the sociological outlook, but must have a can of stuff before their eyes, will hardly find, in their whole trade-list, samples of material more worth collecting, or better entitled to a separate label, than the contents of Professor Ross's Social Control, or Professor Cooley's two books, Human Nature and the Social Order, and Social Organization. Without appealing, to more general treatises, we might rest the case for sociology, against the charge that it has no subject-matter, on the types of relations which these books bring to light.
Fourth, The most impressive body of social science in the world is sociology in everything hut name. Professor Ford says :
In America, although not to any extent in Europe, sociology, con- sidered as a scheme of methodology, has made some impression on scholars in the established sciences.
One might exhaust the thesaurus of sophistries without find- ing a more perfect specimen of correct statement of fact which utterly misrepresents truth. The reason why sociology as methodology has made no distinct impression in Germany is that the methodology that has grown up within the social sciences in Germany is so nearly the methodology which the sociologists in America are formulating that the function of the sociological methodologist is virtually performed under another title. The spirit of life has not been dissected out of the social sciences in Germany in anything like the degree to which it has been killed off in England and America. Resurrection through external methodological treatment is consequently not so obviously called for in the one case. It appears to be the only hope in the other.
When Mr. Hobson, author of The Evolution of Modern Capitalism, was on his latest lecture tour in this country, he made some of his economic colleagues gasp by the frank confession, "The reason why political economy has so little prestige in Eng- land today is that it succeeded in throttling sociology half a cen- tury ago."
