THE PROMISE
much to meet the demand for it. By means of it, orientation to
the present as history is sought. As images of liuman nature*
become more problematic, an increasing need is felt to pay closer
yet more imaginative attention to the social routines and catastrophes
which reveal (and which shape) man's nature in this
time of civil unrest and ideological conflict. Although fashion is
often revealed by attempts to use it, the sociological imagination
is not merely a fashion. It is a quality of mind that seems most
dramatically to promise an understanding of the intimate realities
of ourselves in connection with larger social realities. It is
not merely one quality of mind among the contemporary range
of cultural sensibilities—it is the quality whose wider and more
adroit use offers the promise that all such sensibilities—and in
fact, human reason itself—will come to play a greater role in
human affairs.
The cultural meaning of physical science—the major older
common denominator—is becoming doubtful. As an intellectual
style, physical science is coming to be thought by many as somehow
inadequate. The adequacy of scientific styles of thought and
feeling, imagination and sensibility, has of course from their
beginnings been subject to religious doubt and theological controversy,
but our scientific grandfathers and fathers beat down
such religious doubts. The current doubts are secular, humanistic
—and often quite confused. Recent developments in physical
science—with its technological climax in the H-bomb and the
means of carrying it about the earth—have not been experienced
as a solution to any problems widely known and deeply
pondered by larger intellectual communities and cultural publics.
These developments have been correctly seen as a result of
highly specialized inquiry, and improperly felt to be wonderfully
mysterious. They have raised more problems—both intellectual
and moral—than they have solved, and the problems they
have raised lie almost entirely in the area of social not physical
affairs. The obvious conquest of nature, the overcoming of
scarcity, is felt by men of the overdeveloped societies to be
virtually complete. And now in these societies, science—the chief