100 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
might say, the struggle of the more spiritual and social against the more material and individual forces. These we might call the applied sociologists. For those to whom sociological inves- tigation and teaching belongs as part or whole of their normal occupation, it would be convenient to reserve the designation of professed sociologists.
If the name of pseudo-sociologists is too harsh a designation for those whose sociological thought is uncritically bound up with their material personal interests and prejudices, let us call them empirical sociologists. If you do not have the habit of detaching your sociological reasoning from your personal desires, you can have no adequate conception of social causation, you can have no valid claim to be a scientific observer of social phe- nomena. For this you must have the habit of at least trying to separate your speculative opinions from your material interests. Because they do not habitually make this effort, are to be counted among empirical sociologists some children, most men, and all women.
The empirical sociologist may be, and very often is, within a certain limited range, and for certain limited (mostly personal) purposes, an extremely shrewd observer and prompt to form approximately accurate judgments. But beyond the range of his practical and emotional interests the observations of his intel- lect do not actively extend. A practical test of sociological status is the number and variety of persons you can co-operate with, both in thought and in action. The social experience of the empirical sociologist is in a strict and narrow sense personal his thought is limited by the range of his personal action and conduct. From vicarious participation in the experience of types of personality antithetical to his own, he is cut off. And only in partial, fitful, and disjointed fragments, if at all, can he hope to absorb and utilize that social experience of past generations which survives in the ordered records of science and philosophy.
In fact, the empirical sociologist is, from this point of view, just the individual who has not awakened to that inheritance of unlimited wealth of social experience which countless genera- tions have accumulated for him in the sciences and the arts, in
