In the paper quoted above as document No. 88, p. 200, Jessie Taft says:
The intimate psychological or psychiatric interpretation, the individual intensive treatment, are fundamental for solving the problems of delinquency. No matter how ideal the social conditions, no matter how farsighted the laws, there will always be compensatory behavior in the lives of individuals, and some of this behavior is bound to be unwholesome and socially undesirable. Instinctive protective reactions on the part of society, even the more enlightened mass treatment in institution, will bring results only by accident.
What we need is a treatment of behavior so scientific that results instead of being accidental will be subject to intention and prediction. Biology studies the life-history of individual forms and explains any particular details of their behavior in the light of the life of the organism as a whole from birth to death. Where does a similar case study of human beings belong? Without it there can be no scientific solution of the problems of delinquency.
Our best efforts to reform the delinquent, or even to control the behavior of the young child in such a way as to secure a balanced, efficient, creative, and happy schematization of life are very imperfect. The juvenile court and the experimental schools do not completely realize the hopes they inspired. The most careful methods may result in failure and the most imperfect methods and even neglect of method may result in, or at least not prevent success. We sometimes see a poor, obscure, and underfed boy assuming a definite life-direction, planning to be something, and pursuing his aim with the certitude of the homing instinct, while a boy with the choicest opportunities of life—money, schools, tutors, and travel—remains a nonentity or becomes demoralized.
Now the example of the physical and biological sciences shows that the human mind has the power to work out schemes which secure an adequate control over the material world and over animal and plant life by a series of observations and experiments which have been sufficiently thorough and detailed to discover series of facts and their causal connections which lead to the establishment of general chemical, physical, mechanical, and biological laws, and the same objective methods will lead to similar results in the field of social theory and practice.
There is, indeed, no sharp line between the common-sense method of the average man in determining facts and causal relations and the method of the scientist. When we have found that a certain effect is produced by a certain cause the formulation of this causal dependence has in itself the character of a law; we assume that whenever the cause repeats itself the effect will necessarily follow. The agriculture of the peasant and of the old-fashioned farmer was scientific to the degree that they had observed a causal relation between manure, lime, moisture, seasonal changes, varieties of soils, animal and plant pests, and the success or failure of their crops. But science is superior to common sense in its methods of experimentation, measurement, and comparison, in its isolation and intensive study of problems from mere scientific curiosity, without regard to the practical application of its results. Science is called cold because it is objective, seeking the facts without regard to whether they confirm or destroy existing moral and practical systems.
But science is always eventually constructive. A large number of specialists working in many fields, upon detached and often apparently trivial problems—primroses, potato bugs, mosquitoes, light, sound, electricity, heredity, radium, germs, atoms, etc.—establish a body of facts and relationships the social meaning of which they do not themselves suspect at the time, but which eventually find an application in practical life,—in agriculture, medicine, mechanical invention.
Science accumulates facts and principles which could never be determined by the common sense of the individual or community, and of so great a variety and generality that some of them are constantly passing over into practical life. The old farmer has learned the value of soil analysis, though with reluctance and suspicion, and he has learned to spray his orchards to preserve them from pests whose existence he did not suspect. At this moment science is advising him to put a bounty on the head of the turkey buzzard instead of imposing a fine for killing it. His common sense had told him that the vulture was valuable as a scavenger. Now science tells him that it is an ally of the paralysis fly and carries cattle, hog, and other diseases over the country. “Probably more than the income from a million dollars is spent each year in the several marine biological institutions for the study of three lowly forms,—the sea urchin and its progeny, the coral, and the jelly-fish.” An American entomologist has spent many years in measuring the influence of physical environment on potato bugs. He established colonies of these insects in Mexico, moved them from one temperature to another, one degree of humidity to another, one altitude to another, and recorded the changes shown in the offspring. He then moved the new generations back to the old environment and recorded the results,—whether the spots and other acquired characters changed or remained. His object was to determine certain laws of heredity,—whether and under what conditions new species are produced, whether acquired characters are hereditary. To common sense this procedure seems trivial, almost insane. But assuming that a biologist determines a law of heredity, this will presumably have a practical effect in the fields of agriculture, eugenics, crime, and medicine.
These examples show that a science which results in a practical and efficient technic is constituted by treating it as an end in itself, not merely as a means to something else, and giving it time and opportunity to develop along all the lines of investigation possible, even if we do not know what will be the eventual applications of one or another of its results. We can then take every one of its results and try where and in what way they can be practically applied. We do not know what the future science will be before it is constituted, and what may be the applications of its discoveries before they are applied.
But, on the other hand, the scientist will naturally be influenced in setting and solving his problems by the appreciation that if discoveries are made in certain fields practical applications will follow. He may know, for example, that if we can discover the scarlet fever germ we can control this disease, and he may work on this problem, or he may suspect that if we knew more of the chemistry of sugar we could control cancer, and may work on that problem.