An Englishman Looks at the World: Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary MattersWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
An Englishman Looks at the World: Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Great Britain -- Social conditions; Social problems; United States -- Social conditions
Sociology, it is evident, is, upon any hypothesis, no less than the
attempt to bring that vast, complex, unique Being, its subject, into
clear, true relations with the individual intelligence. Now, since
individual intelligences are individual, and each is a little
differently placed in regard to the subject under consideration, since
the personal angle of vision is much wider towards humanity than towards
the circumambient horizon of matter, it should be manifest that no
sociology of universal compulsion, of anything approaching the general
validity of the physical sciences, is ever to be hoped for--at least
upon the metaphysical assumptions of this paper. With that conceded, we
may go on to consider the more hopeful ways in which that great Being
may be presented in a comprehensible manner. Essentially this
presentation must involve an element of self-expression must partake
quite as much of the nature of art as of science. One finds in the first
conference of the Sociological Society, Professor Stein, speaking,
indeed a very different philosophical dialect from mine, but coming to
the same practical conclusion in the matter, and Mr. Osman Newland
counting "evolving ideals for the future" as part of the sociologist's
work. Mr. Alfred Fouillée also moves very interestingly in the region of
this same idea; he concedes an essential difference between sociology
and all other sciences in the fact of a "certain kind of liberty
belonging to society in the exercise of its higher functions." He says
further: "If this view be correct, it will not do for us to follow in
the steps of Comte and Spencer, and transfer, bodily and ready-made, the
conceptions and the methods of the natural sciences into the science of
society. For here the fact of _consciousness_ entails a reaction of the
whole assemblage of social phenomena upon themselves, such as the
natural sciences have no example of." And he concludes: "Sociology
ought, therefore, to guard carefully against the tendency to crystallise
that which is essentially fluid and moving, the tendency to consider as
given fact or dead data that which creates itself and gives itself into
the world of phenomena continually by force of its own ideal
conception." These opinions do, in their various keys, sound a similar
_motif_ to mine. If, indeed, the tendency of these remarks is
justifiable, then unavoidably the subjective element, which is beauty,
must coalesce with the objective, which is truth; and sociology mast be
neither art simply, nor science in the narrow meaning of the word at
all, but knowledge rendered imaginatively, and with an element of
personality that is to say, in the highest sense of the term,
literature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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