Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1910 edition. Excerpt: ... LECTURE VII THE ANALYTICAL PHASE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE In the first lecture I said that social science is the proxy of all men in finding out the meaning of life. Science is abortion until its function is complete in action. The final justification for more knowledge of the social process is more ability to carry on the process and to advance it to higher levels. Not in spite of this estimate, but because of it, I am giving nearly ten times more attention in these lectures to the preparatory stages of social science than to the stage of application. I do so deliberately. In my judgment scholars will do most for the ultimate efficiency of social science if, at present at any rate, they preserve as a rule at least as large a ratio as this between criticism of scientific method and attempts to put such methods as we have into social experiment. I shall say more on this point in a later lecture. In the sixth lecture I attempted to show how much and how complicated work is involved merely in stating the facts of a brief passage in human experience. But, as though all this necessary description had been accomplished, scholars have talked very freely for over a century of the "laws of history." In the rough they usually mean by the expression formulations of the causal ancestry of everything that is, back to its absolute beginning. When you come to think of it, in connection with the schedule that I presented in the last lecture of the different sorts of things which must be found out before we can even state accurately what occurred in a given case, to say nothing of the causes and effects of what occurred, how many passages do you suppose there are in human experience that have been looked into with anything approaching the thoroughness demanded?...
