The accumulated knowledge of the ages, handed on from one generation to the next, enables the scientist to suggest the direction in which new experiments should be made as well as to predict their probable outcome. His work ceases to be haphazard. It has a well-understood policy and common problems.
Particularly in the realm of natural science, has there been a vast accumulation of verified knowledge, from which there have been deduced principles and laws which enable the electrician or the astronomer to predict the action of the electric current or the course of the stars with almost unerring accuracy. To be sure, these predictions do sometimes go wrong, but for the most part they are founded on verified and tested hypotheses.
The past thus advises the present, which, from the vantage ground so gained, prepares its contribution to the future. If each generation were compelled to learn how to build fires, to employ language, to shape pottery, to weave, to print and to harness electricity all over again, it would seldom get farther than the rudiments of what is now called civilization.
The new knowledge that is gained in each generation is obtained through experiment, but many costly errors are avoided in these experiments through the wisdom that is based on the accumulated knowledge of the past.
Thus each generation of scientists accepts from its predecessors a trust for the future. Not only must it preserve the body of knowledge, but it must verify, amplify and enrich it. This is as true of the social scientist as it is of the natural scientist. The difference between them is that the natural scientist has worked out his technique and established his field, while the social scientist has reached only the threshold.
6. Accumulating Social Knowledge
Social knowledge is yet in its infancy. It is only within the century that Comte, Buckle, Marx, Spencer and other historians and sociologists have made an attempt to place the accumulations of social knowledge on a par with the accumulations of mathematical or chemical knowledge.
Until some effort was made to study society in a scientific spirit, there was no reason for supposing that men might be able to cope with social ills or to prevent social disaster. Even to-day, while there is no longer any question as to the possibility of classifying social facts, and while sociology is regarded as a science of great promise, the feeling lingers that social events are fore-ordained. Many people feel to-day about social disaster as the men of the middle ages felt about the plague—that it is outside the field of man's preventive power. Another fatalistic school of thought holds that men learn their social lessons only through failure and disaster. According to the first line of thought it is useless to interfere with social processes because they are in the hands of the gods; according to the second, men will not interfere until they have been whipped into rebellion by the adverse conditions surrounding them.
Men in the past have modified the course of human events in the most profound way. The first smelter of iron and the first constructor of a wheel began a series of events that is still molding social life. It is quite possible to say that these events were fore-ordained, but it is at least equally possible to reply that the same process of fore-ordination is still busy, and that the changes that it will make through the present generation will be at least as important as those which it has made in the preceding ages.