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“ The substitution of more for less effective industrial organization may necessarily, as in the substitution of machinery for hand labor, involve enormous hardship to individuals. The men who are devising and testing new powers of organization may nevertheless, like the great mechanical inventors, turn out to have done more for the human race in applying their talents to industrial administration, than through the sum of their acknowledged benefactions, by which ignorant people assume that rich men alone justify their existence. ”

“ Sociology has been promoted by increased attention to the fact that all knowledge is mediate. No knowledge is self-sufficient. Each kind of knowledge plays its rôle, but its value is the value of the service which it renders in the economy of human existence. It is therefore principal or subordinate—primary or secondary—essential or incidental—but never absolute. Knowledge ranks with knowledge according to the part which each species of knowledge performs in procuring life larger in any dimension, or richer in any quality. ”

“ That all the human beings in one locality, in one nationality, in the world, including women, children, slaves, foreigners, constitute in each case a community, of which each soul is a sacred unit and the whole a common race, has never been clearly apprehended or practically recognized in law and customs outside of Christianity. To the question, then, whether there be such a thing as Christian sociology, we answer, there is no other. ”

“ Again, we cannot imagine a discovery in the historical portion of linguistic science that would equal Jenner's invention of vaccination in value to the human race. A final demonstration and formulation of the precise method of evolution up to date would be immeasurably inferior in value to such projection of the process of evolution into the future that the present generation of men would be enabled and induced to secure for the next generation a single step of advancement toward the ultimate realization of maximum welfare. ”

“ They certainly are not if they are incapable of distinguishing between the use and the abuse of organization and of aggregated capital. It is both wrong and stupid for people to provoke each other into spasms of indignation against colossal business organizations in general, or against the managers of vast industrial operations, as such. This Journal will not be equivocal in exposing the usurpations of capitalism, or in explaining principles to which the people must learn to hold corporations accountable. ”

“ Let us assume that this is the pivotal element in sociology. There remain the phenomena of associated human life since men have peopled the earth; the reactions between human groups and their physical environments; between groups and their units, between groups and contemporary groups; between groups and their posterity. From all these facts or from such of them as can be discovered, we have to learn the laws of cause and effect, physical and psychical, to which social beings are subject; in spite of which or by means of which approach to the Christian ideal is to be accomplished. ”

“ Especially has the question been discussed in connection with music, sculpture, painting, poetry, science—Is it valuable chiefly for its own sake, or chiefly for its utilitarian services? Without prying into the psychology of the change, we note the fact that men are more generally content than ever before to adjourn this attempt at giving an absolute position in the scale of values to the different objects of human interest; and we are able to say of each object of knowledge—it is worth attention both for its own intrinsic importance and for its value as a fragment of all useful knowledge. ”

“ For the Bible, Christianity, and the church have a great deal to do with social problems or with 'the social problem,' as the rather vague popular generalization puts it. But their relation to social problems or subjects is one thing, and their relation to the problems of sociology as a science is quite another. The one is chiefly within the field of practical religion; the other comes mainly within the realm of science, where the Bible is silent so far as any positive teaching goes.
"Christianity is found in the very warp and woof of human social life. ”

“ The use of biological analogies as a tool in sociology does not mean the seizure of biological facts and their forcible transfer into sociology. It does not mean that finding analogies between biological and societary facts constitutes sociology. It means that the sociologist has to do with societary interrelations, the complexities of which he tries to understand by checking off the involutions which are analogous with biological correlations, and by observing afterwards the unparalleled remainder by which the societary facts exceed in complexity the biological facts. ”

“ Mankind, the permutation of men, the associations of men, in which there is reciprocal modification of the association by its components, and of the components by the association—men in social reciprocity, this is the last and highest stage of experience which our observation discovers, and this consummate reality of associated human life, in which the career of individuals is made or marred, forms the setting, to interpret and to be interpreted by all the included particulars which special knowledge accumulates. ”

“ By knowing the present better we shall be able to make better use of knowledge that may be gained about the past. This fact gives to the work performed by many observers of neglected contemporary facts a dignity that is as yet too rarely acknowledged. ”

“ The scientific value of contemporary phenomena, as the material for social philosophy, is not placed as high as it deserves to be by the most competent sociologists. Perhaps they instinctively avoid dealing with these facts, from dread of being confused with the unscientific people who make the name social science contemptible. At all events the men who have done the most to develop sociological methodology have given relatively excessive attention to sources of evidence which can never be as productive as contemporary sources. ”

“ The emergence of a new attempt to deal with the phenomena of society, and the application of a new name, Sociology, to this attempt, means, in the simplest words, that the growing dissatisfaction of scholars in all the branches of social science about the impotent isolation of the divisions of social science from each other has at last found effective expression in the differentiation of class of men calling themselves sociologists, who are offering themselves as the missing links to bind these disjecta membra together. ”

“ Every science throws its particular light upon some phase of the comprehensive societary problem. The physical sciences, first and foremost, analyze the external material conditions to which societies as well as individuals must accommodate themselves. The biological sciences deal at last with the vital factors which determine the individual type, and thus indirectly much of the social structure. The psychical sciences, both historical and contemporary, control another order of phenomena proceeding primarily from individuals, but combined at last into phenomena that have societary importance. ”

“ The all-inclusive fact of association in groups or societies of various grades, from the family up to the race, presents the most complex forms of the human life problem. What are the essentials and what are the accidents of the associated or societary condition? What limitations does it fix to human accomplishments? What aids does it furnish to human endeavors? What taslcs does it impose, what aims does it suggest and what means and methods does it stipulate for the combination of human effort ? These are not questions invented in the seclusion of scholars' libraries. ”

“ From Christianity, on the other hand, we shall get the highest scientific incentive, inspiration to the love of truth, to docility, and to the diligent use of scientific resources, just as we do in any of the other sciences, but to a greater amount, because of the dominance of the social elements in the field of religion.
"Christian sociology as a popular catchword for the science, or as a phrase for those who have lent their minds to certain preconceived theories beyond recovery, will have its run. ”

“ In the case of societies too, as with animals, we find that the form of development has apparently been determined in part by physical environment. The study of societies involves therefore the tracing of an evolutionary process within forms of human association. Instead of being an innovation due to sociology, this perception has been more or less familiar to historians and philosophers as far back as Aristotle, and probably much earlier. Sociologists are simply sharpening one of the tools which their predecessors already used. ”

“ In the reckless spirit of those other gross and sordid souls who refuse to be diverted from their ordinary avocations by the latest prediction of the end of the world, we shall pursue the illusion that the study of actual men in actual social relations will continue to reward the student, and through him bless mankind at large, during a considerable portion of the twentieth century. ”

“ In order to get our minds clear as to the greater complexity of societary phenomena, we have no recourse so useful as employment of the concepts which familiarity with the next antecedent order of complexity furnishes. These will serve us in preliminary surveys, at any rate, but their best service in a given case may be their demonstration of the gap between analogy and identity. Perception of the insufficiency of biological analogies does not, however, as so many critics appear to imagine, involve the consequence that resort should be had to conceptions still less adequate. ”

“ To make the most of knowledge it is necessary to perform two processes, either deliberately or unconsciously,—first, the process of studying the particular subject as though it were the one object of interest upon which the energies of the human mind ought to concentrate ”

“ In other words, we no longer take either horn of the dilemma, but we regard all knowable truths both as ends and as means; as the goal of one stage of knowledge and as the points of departure for another stage. ”

“ Now, if writers, and especially editors, professors of social ethics in our theological seminaries, and preachers, will say simply 'social' when that is all they mean, and talk of social rather than of sociological problems when all they have in mind is the practical or generally intelligent treatment of social topics, and not be constantly confusing their readers and themselves by an indiscriminate use of the word 'sociological' in both senses, they will do the science and the people a great service. ”

“ A religious newspaper of good standing gets a professor of sociology (in a theological seminary, it is true, rather than from a university) and an able doctor of divinity to write articles on 'the present sociological movement.' They assume, and rightly in all probability, that they are desired to discuss the present social movement, and not the progress in the science of sociology, which alone is the sociological movement. ”

“ It cannot be too forcibly urged that past and present societary facts must serve as reciprocal interpreters; with this provision it seems to be timely to advocate at present the devotion of a larger proportion of sociologists' attention to scientific treatment of facts taking place before our eyes. Whatever be the ultimate success of scholars in reconstructing history, there is no single past period or past societary status of which relatively so complete knowledge is available as of our own civilization. ”

“ The fact is that our era is a period of experimentation with almost untried possibilities of industrial combination. It is quite possible that the organization of production and circulation and distribution toward which we are tending will be so different from present arrangements that all attempts to imagine it are at fault. ”