But as things go now, the social scientist assembles his data out of a
mass of unrelated material. Social processes are recorded
spasmodically, quite often as accidents of administration. A report to
Congress, a debate, an investigation, legal briefs, a census, a
tariff, a tax schedule; the material, like the skull of the Piltdown
man, has to be put together by ingenious inference before the student
obtains any sort of picture of the event he is studying. Though it
deals with the conscious life of his fellow citizens, it is all too
often distressingly opaque, because the man who is trying to
generalize has practically no supervision of the way his data are
collected. Imagine medical research conducted by students who could
rarely go into a hospital, were deprived of animal experiment, and
compelled to draw conclusions from the stories of people who had been
ill, the reports of nurses, each of whom had her own system of
diagnosis, and the statistics compiled by the Bureau of Internal
Revenue on the excess profits of druggists. The social scientist has
usually to make what he can out of categories that were uncritically
in the mind of an official who administered some part of a law, or who
was out to justify, to persuade, to claim, or to prove. The student
knows this, and, as a protection against it, has developed that branch
of scholarship which is an elaborated suspicion about where to
discount his information.
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