Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/704

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690 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

allusions that even raise the question whether these theories were among the important formative factors of German civic life. It is a travesty of science which picks subjects for investigation according to the caprice of the investigator. Valid science would learn from the objective process encountered which factors have more meaning for the whole development actually taking place, and which factors have less meaning, and it would reconstruct the process so as to place as many factors as can be discovered in the relativity of their actual functions.

A seventh commonplace is immediately suggested by the sixth, namely, it is a scientific desideratum that some method should be developed for determining a tentative order of values among the unknown factors about which inquiry is needed in the interest of social interpretation.

In one of the preliminary announcements of the "scientific" congresses connected with the last Paris exposition, the only visible nexus between the congresses was a conspectus in the alphabetical order of their titles. They began with Acetylene and ended with Zionism. The projectors builded better than they knew in vizualizing the anarchy of modern scientific investi- gation. In the last number of the Economic Bulletin I find this classification of the literature which the Bulletin is sup- posed to cover: (i) General Works, Theory and its History; (2) Economic History and Geography; (3) Agriculture, Min- ing, Forestry, and Fisheries; (4) Manufacturing Industries; (5) Transportation and Communication; (6) Trade, Commerce and Commercial Crises; (7) Accounting, Business Methods, Investments, and the Exchanges; (8) Capital and Capitalistic Organization; (9) Labor and Labor Organizations; (10) Money, Prices, Credit, and Banking; ( 1 1 ) Public Finance, Taxation, and Tariff; (12) Statistics of Population, Immigration, and Industry; (13) Insurance and Pensions; (14) Charities, Corrections, and Social Reforms; (15) Socialism and Co-operative Enterprises; (16) Municipal Questions; (17) Sociology; (18) Miscellaneous. Now I have no quarrel with the necessary evil of bibliographical classification. Let this scheme pass as good of its kind, for its own end of mechanical convenience. I am pointing out simply