THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 49
simply sociological common-sense. It is perception of the ele- ments of the situation, and judgment of proportions among the elements.
Consequently, if we are dealing with individual or group cases of industrial incapacity, for instance, we confront the question how largely it is congenital. If we are dealing with the vices of intemperance or of licentiousness, we have problems, in part at least, of pathology and of biological philosophy. If we are dealing with more serious criminality, we are in the thick of the positive questions about the measure of irresponsibility in conse- quence of violation of physical law by the delinquent or his ancestors.
In this survey we cannot enter specifically into any of the ques- tions thus suggested. They all belong more properly elsewhere. The main contention may be repeated in this form : The knowl- edge that men will want above all other knowledges when they are wise enough to understand their own interests is knowledge of the conditions of human life. When men reach ability to maintain an effective demand for this knowledge, they will be dissatisfied with the ways in which our sciences satisfy this demand. Spe- cifically, we have no respectable report of the ways in which the operation of cosmic laws has determined the course of human development. History as it is written is very largely a solemn farce, because it persists in devoting relatively so much more strength to the superficial and inconsequential factors in the development of society than to the essential factors. If the truth were known, we might find, for example, that it was not bad politics, nor bad political economy, but ignorance of agricul- tural chemistry that overthrew the Roman empire. We might find that the crusades were less inspired by piety than by poverty, and that this poverty was primarily the correlate of outraged physical law. Hundreds of historians have discoursed very wise- acrely about the incidents of the Hundred Years' War, but they have hardly thought to inquire whether the violated physical law, that was producing the plague and the black death all over Europe, was not somehow a more fundamental influence in mak- ing domestic and international politics than all the questions
