Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/114

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102
THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

selves are all their life deceived (by the senses and the flesh). This quaint scheme, with its archaic phrasing, contains a suggestion indirectly only for the classification of sociological types, and directly rather for the sociological phases in the life-history of the race—and to a certain extent, therefore, of the individual also. It is true, the state of neither deceiving nor being deceived may seem more remote to the modern sociologist than to the sixteenth-century theologian. But that (without denying the frequency of spiritual degeneration) is because the sociologist is more modest for the individual, more ambitious for the race. The fragments that exegetical criticism has for three centuries or more, been chipping from the theological heaven are many of them being gathered up by the sociologist toward the building of the social ideal of the race.

It will be complained, doubtless, that we are a long time in coming to the founders of sociology. But the purpose of this paper has not been achieved if it has not been made clear that we are all of us founders of sociology—perhaps for most of us, it should be said, dumbfounders. The foundations of every science are laid in the personal experience of mankind. The history of civilization shows every science growing up as an undistinguished part of the general knowledge acquired by man in the daily routine of life. And, moreover, these unrecorded beginnings of science are carried to a considerable degree of systematic development before being detached from their practical uses, to become, as science, an object of conscious study by a specially trained body of cultivators. This is true of the latest of the sciences, sociology, as of the earliest, mathematics. Are we not to include among the founders of astronomy, mechanics, physics, and chemistry the unknown discoverers and improvers of the month and year; of the lever and the pulley; of fire and light; of weights and the balance? Are we not to include among the founders of natural history the unknown experimentalists who domesticated the plants and animals of the garden and the farmyard?

And, concurrently with these discoveries and inventions which grew and accumulated into the physical and biological arts and