THE SOCIOLOGICAL STAGE IN THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
ALBION W. SMALL The University of Chicago
For more years than we like to acknowledge, some of us have been saying that sociology is the fundamental human science. Others of us have preferred to say that sociology is the inclusive human science. Outside the ranks of sociologists there has been little evidence either of understanding these formulas or of will to understand them. Probably we have not always accurately interpreted one another's versions of these propositions, and possibly if we could begin over again from our present point of view we might find ways of expressing what we were groping after in an idiom that would grate less harshly on the ears of the unconvinced.
At all events I do not intend to unlimber those instruments of a warfare which now seems almost as ancient as it was honor- able. I shall begin with the irenic assertion that whatever else may have been true or false about sociology, it was inevitable. Many acorns must feed swine and many more must rot on the ground, but those that strike root and survive are bound to become oaks. So thinking about human affairs has had to share the lot of all things mundane by yielding its wasteful toll of abortions and futilities. Given anywhere however the conditions for persistence, given freedom to evolve what is involved, given time to survey its previous course and to prospect the unexplored regions within its horizon, and thinking about human experience is as certain, in the fulness of time, to acquire the reach of soci- ology as the child to attain the stature of a man.
Whether or not we believe human reason capable of pene- trating the sub- or the super-finite, all liberated minds are agreed that there is no stopping-place for our intelligence until we have applied our understanding with all its resources to everything that falls within the sweep of our conscious experience. Higher
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