THE PROSPECTS OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 



invention or other cultural change were wholly undreamed 

 of by the participants. Would a Susan B. Anthony and 

 Elizabeth Cady Stanton not turn in their graves if they 

 could be made to realize that they helped to mother birth 

 control and trial marriages? A conspicuous current case 

 is the Eighteenth Amendment. Cultural evolution is thus a 

 blind stumbling. Great civilizations have repeatedly 

 arisen only to disappear, while the peoples that created 

 them knew neither why they rose nor why they fell. 

 Nor can we now speak of such matters with any confi- 

 dence. However, the realization that realistic cause and 

 effect are universal in scope gives some ground for opti- 

 mism as to the future. We have in organized scientific re- 

 search a culture trait that is unique. The Greeks came very 

 close to its discovery; had they once realized its signifi- 

 cance, they would have changed the course of civilization 

 during the last two thousand years. We, on the other hand, 

 have at length placed science among the mores and made 

 it the final judge of truth and validity. The social sciences, 

 however, make slow progress toward that positivity 

 which is essential for clear-sighted control. This is mainly 

 due to two facts: first, the difficulty of extricating social 

 research from the biases and taboos entrenched in the 

 economic, political, and ethical mores themselves. Scientific 

 objectivity is immensely more difficult to attain. Second, 

 social phenomena are immensely more complex than those 

 investigated in any other field. They result from an almost 

 infinitely variable interaction of physiographic, biologi- 

 cal, psychological, and cultural factors which make the 

 detection of general laws extremely difficult. Moreover, 

 the applications of science to social life necessarily, at 

 present, have reference only to immediate problems and 

 scarcely at all to the remote future. For example, medicine, 

 sanitation, and psychiatry tend to give an increasingly 

 scientific quality to a vast range of humanitarian activities. 



[51] 



