[26]  "So soon as a nation discovers that it holds in the heads and hearts of its individual citizens the vast mine of knowledge, out of which it may build a just government, then more and more it calls those citizens to select their rulers and to judge the justice of their acts.

[27]  "Even here, however, the temptation is to ask only for the wisdom of citizens of a certain grade or those of recognized worth. Continually some classes are tacitly or expressly excluded. Thus women have been excluded from modern democracy because of the persistent theory of female subjection and because it was argued that their husbands or other male folks would look to their interests. Now, manifestly, most husbands, fathers, and brothers will, so far as they know how or as they realize women's needs, look after them. But remember the foundation of the argument, — that in the last analysis only the sufferer knows his sufferings and that no state can be strong which excludes from its expressed wisdom the knowl­edge possessed by mothers, wives, and daughters. We have but to view the unsatisfactory relations of the sexes the world over and the problem of children to realize how desperately we need this excluded wisdom.

[28]  "The same arguments apply to other excluded groups: if a race, like the Negro race, is excluded, then so far as that race is a part of the economic and social organization of the land, the feeling and the experience of that race are absolutely necessary to the realization of the broadest justice for all citizens. Or if the "sub­merged tenth" be excluded, then again, there is lost from the world an experience of untold value, and they must be raised rapidly to a place where they can speak for themselves. In the same way and for the same reason children must be educated, insanity prevented, and only those put under the guardianship of others who can in no way be trained to speak for themselves.

[29]  "The real argument for democracy is, then, that in the people we have the source of that endless life and unbounded wisdom which the rulers of men must have. A given people today may not be intelligent, but through a democratic govern­ment that recognizes, not only the worth of the individual to himself, but the worth of his feelings and experiences to all, they can educate, not only the individual unit, but generation after generation, until they accumulate vast stores of wisdom. Democracy alone is the method of showing the whole experience of the race for the benefit of the future and if democracy tries to exclude women or Negroes or the poor or any class because of innate characteristics which do not interfere with intelligence, then that democracy cripples itself and belies its name." [OROM 1920]

"That there are limits is shown by the rhythm in birth and death rates and the distribution by sex; it is found further in human customs and laws, the forms of government, the laws of trade, and even in charity and ethics. As, however, we rise in the realm of conduct, we note a primary and a secondary rhythm. A primary rhythm depending, as we have indicated, on physical forces and physical law; but within this appears again and again a secondary rhythm which, while presenting nearly the same uniformity as the first, differs from it in its more or less sudden rise at a given tune, in accordance with prearranged plan and prediction and in being liable to stoppage and change according to similar plan. An example of primary uniformity is the death rate; of secondary uniformity, the operation of a woman's club; to confound the two sorts of human uniformity is fatal to clear thinking; to explain them we must assume Law and Chance working in conjunction — Chance being the scientific side of inexplicable Will." [SOCH ca.1904-5: ¶ 27; Capitalization in the original]

"The silently growing assumption of this age is that the probation of races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven inefficiency and not worth the saving. Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men. A thousand years ago such an assumption, easily possible, would have made it difficult for the Teuton to prove his right to life. Two thousand years ago such dogmatism, readily welcome, would have scouted the idea of blond races ever leading civilization. So wofully [sic] unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of "swift" and "slow" in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science. Why should Aeschylus have sung two thousand years before Shakespeare was born? Why has civilization flourished in Europe, and flickered, flamed, and died in Africa? So long as the world stands meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom of opportunity to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty?" [SBF 1903: Ch. XIV]

"It is, to be sure, puzzling to know why the Soudan [sic] should linger a thousand years in culture behind the valley of the Seine, but it is no more puzzling than the fact that the valley of the Thames was miserably backward as compared with the banks of the Tiber. Climate, human contact, facilities of communication, and what we call accident have played great part in the rise of culture among nations: to ignore these and to assert dogmatically that the present distribution of culture is a fair index of the distribution of human ability and desert is to make an assertion for which there is not the slightest scientific warrant." [EORP 1909: ¶ 18]

"Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself. There is no giving or bartering between them. No thought even comes into direct sight of a thought in another personal consciousness than its own. Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law. It seems as if the elementary psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that thought, but my thought, every thought being owned. Neither contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor similarity of quality and content are able to fuse thoughts together which are sundered by this barrier of belonging to different personal minds. The breaches between such thoughts are the most absolute breaches in nature. Everyone will recognize this to be true, so long as the existence of something corresponding to the term 'personal mind' is all that is insisted on, without any particular view of its nature being implied. On these terms the personal self rather than the thought might be treated as the immediate datum in psychology. The universal conscious fact is not 'feelings and thoughts exist,' but 'I think' and 'I feel.' No psychology, at any rate, can question the existence of personal selves. The worst a psychology can do is so to interpret the nature of these selves as to rob them of their worth." [1890: 226; footnote omitted; emphasis in the original]

"Here in this my neighbor stand things I do not know, experiences I have never felt, depths whose darkness is beyond me, and heights hidden by the clouds; or, perhaps, rather, differences in ways of thinking, and dreaming, and feeling which I guess at rather than know; strange twistings of soul that curve between the grotesque and the awful." [IASC 1905 ¶ 3]

"7. The doubt, the paradox of the possibility of knowledge beyond our own feeling and thought, remains forever. Everything may be fantastic mirage, beyond what we now feel. But the very statement of this is contradictory, since I must assume that you exist; and whatever your emotion is, you assume that I also feel; and our assumptions in the main work, they click, they correspond with our thinking. It is possible to go so far in this search for reality that language[,] that tool of thought, fails us; its words lose and shift meaning and we fail ln logic and precision.

"8. Here the great scientific tool of the Hypothesis is discovered; we assume that certain things are true; we act as though this assumption is Truth. The ensuing facts of our experience arrange themselves in accord with our assumption. Therefore our assumption is True; or the facts agree except in certain particulars; we rearrange our assumptions to fit the new experience or more fully to explain the old. The new Hypothesis becomes accepted Truth. But all Truth, save our own feeling, we hold tentatively and watchfully, ready to change our conception, once a new explanation or phenomena fits the facts more perfectly.

"To illustrate this abstract statement: we look out from our window and see a flat world with curving dome of heaven; ergo, the world is flat and the sky bends above it. That is obvious truth. But on a voyage to Europe, we see an approaching ship "rise" from the ocean; we descry its smoke, then its funnels, than its hull; manifestly the earth curves too; it is not flat. The ship is coming up over a vast curving surface. We alter our concept of the shape of the Earth. It is not flat."​ [SHMA undated, ca. 1946: pp.2-3; Cap­i­tal­i­za­tion in the original; para­graph numbers 7 and 8 in the original]

"On this hypothesis of physical existence outside our direct apprehension we have built a solid material world, which responds to extraordinary and intricate Natural Law. This is what we call the Science of Matter and it is true even if we cannot "prove" its actual existence. In fact in our limitations of knowledge and existence, what is "proof" anyway, except the fact that the Hypothesis works. Now and then, but not often our hypothesis breaks down in some spot — Light bends instead of going straight; that does not bother us; we re-adjust our hypothesis in that small but significant particular and proceed to greater discoveries of physical law." [SOST undated: p.1; Capitalization in the original; spelling has been corrected; Du Bois's hand-written additions, insertions, and deletions have been incorporated in the quotation.]

[1]  "Sociology is the science which measures the element of the incalculable chance in the action of living beings. Natural science assumes the invariable operation of natural laws, but admits that when the phenomena of life and consciousness appear, then more and more laws have to be expressed as tendencies and even probabilities. Sociology grants the rule of law in the natural sciences, but assumes that when the phenomena of life and consciousness appear, that an incalculable element enters. And that it does not seem at present as though the resultant phenomena can be explained without assuming an element, which for lack of a better name, we called, chance or will, or creative impulse. Sociology is certain that the area in which this incalculable element is present, is not nearly as wide as earlier ages have assumed, but tends, under the careful research of natural science, to be more and more narrowed. But nevertheless, sociology sees no way in which we can maintain the logic of our present language, our present education, ethics and law, unless we cling to the assumption that natural law does not occupy the whole field of force, but that somehow force is acted upon and deflected and re-directed by other force which can not be accounted for by the axiom of the conservation of energy. It has always been assumed that this is the case, and it is not unscientific that in modern, rational, scientific research, we should continue to assume such a realm of chance until the universality of natural law is absolutely proven.

[2]  "Physics and chemistry, therefore, study the action and re-action of matter. Biology studies the laws of life. Psychology, the action and re-action of matter in the form of nervous energy. History records the facts of human action, so far as ascertainable, while sociology studies and measures with all possible exactitude and with the use of historic data, and the results of all science, the limits of the action of natural law, and of that incalculable element in the action of living beings, which for want of a better name, we call chance." [PDOS undated: p.1]

[4]  "For two years I studied under William James while he was developing Pragmatism; under Santayana and his attractive mysticism and under Royce and his Hegelian idealism. I then found and adopted a philosophy which has served me since; thereafter I turned to the study of History and what has become Sociology.

[5]  "I think in general I agree with your conclusions and criticism; but I would express my philosophy more simply. Several times in the past I have started to formulate it, but met such puzzled looks that it remains only partially set down in scraps of manuscript. I gave up the search of "Absolute" Truth; not from doubts of the existence of reality, but because I believe that our limited knowledge and clumsy methods of research made it impossible now completely to apprehend Truth. I nevertheless firmly believed that gradually the human mind and absolute and provable truth would approach each other and like the "Asymtotes [sic] of the Hyperbola" (I learned the phrase in high school and was ever after fascinated by it) would approach each other nearer and nearer and yet never in all eternity meet. I therefore turned to Assumption — scientific Hypothesis. I assumed the existence of Truth, since to assume anything else or not to assume was unthinkable. I assumed that Truth was only partially known but that it was ultimately largely knowable, although perhaps in part forever Unknowable. Science adopted the hypothesis of a Knower and something Known. The Jamesian Pragmatism as I understood it from his lips was not based on the "usefulness" of a hypothesis, as you put it, but on its workable logic if its truth was assumed. Also of necessity I assumed Cause and Change. With these admittedly unprovable assumptions, I proposed to make a scientific study of human action, based on the hypotheses of the reality of such actions, of their causal connections and of their continued occurrence and change because of Law and Chance. I called Sociology the measurement of the element of Chance in Human Action." [LHA 1956 ¶¶ 4-5]

The very possibility of historical scholarship as an enterprise distinct from propaganda requires of its practitioners that vital minimum of ascetic self-discipline that enable a person to do such things as abandon wishful thinking, assimilate bad news, discard pleasing interpretations that cannot pass elementary tests of logic, and most important of all, suspend or bracket one's own perception long enough to enter sympathetically into the alien and possibly repugnant perspectives of rival thinkers. All of these mental acts . . . require detachment, an undeniably ascetic capacity to achieve some distance from one's own spontaneous perceptions and convictions, to imagine how the world appears in another's eyes, to experimentally adopt perspectives that do not come naturally.... (Haskell 1998: 148-149; Emphasis in the original)

"It would be only fair to the reader to say frankly in advance that the attitude of any person toward this story will be distinctly influenced by his theories of the Negro race. If he believes that the Negro in America and in general is an average and ordinary human being, who under given environment develops like other human beings, then he will read this story and judge it by the facts adduced. If, however, he regards the Negro as a distinctly inferior creation, who can never successfully take part in modern civilization and whose emancipation and enfranchisement were gestures against nature, then he will need something more than the sort of facts that I have set down. But this latter person, I am not trying to convince. I am simply pointing out these two points of view, so obvious to Americans, and then without further ado, I am assuming the truth of the first. In fine, I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience." [BREC 1935]

[27]  "Even here, however, the temptation is to ask only for the wisdom of citizens of a certain grade or those of rec­og­nized worth. Continually some classes are tacitly or expressly excluded. Thus women have been excluded from modern democracy because of the persistent theory of female subjection and because it was argued that their husbands or other male folks would look to their interests. Now, manifestly, most husbands, fathers, and brothers will, so far as they know how or as they realize women's needs, look after them. But remember the foundation of the argument, — that in the last analysis only the sufferer knows his sufferings and that no state can be strong which excludes from its expressed wisdom the knowl­edge possessed by mothers, wives, and daughters. We have but to view the unsat­is­fac­tory relations of the sexes the world over and the problem of children to realize how desperately we need this excluded wisdom.

[28]  "The same arguments apply to other excluded groups: if a race, like the Negro race, is excluded, then so far as that race is a part of the economic and social organ­i­za­tion of the land, the feeling and the experience of that race are absolutely necessary to the realization of the broadest justice for all citizens. Or if the "sub­merged tenth" be excluded, then again, there is lost from the world an experience of untold value, and they must be raised rapidly to a place where they can speak for themselves. In the same way and for the same reason children must be educated, insanity prevented, and only those put under the guardianship of others who can in no way be trained to speak for themselves.

[29]  "The real argument for democracy is, then, that in the people we have the source of that endless life and unbounded wisdom which the rulers of men must have. A given people today may not be intelligent, but through a democratic gov­ern­ment that rec­og­nizes, not only the worth of the indi­vid­u­al to himself, but the worth of his feelings and experiences to all, they can educate, not only the indi­vid­u­al unit, but genera­tion after genera­tion, until they accumulate vast stores of wisdom. Democ­ra­cy alone is the method of showing the whole experience of the race for the benefit of the future and if democ­ra­cy tries to exclude women or Negroes or the poor or any class because of innate char­ac­ter­is­tics which do not inter­fere with intelligence, then that democracy cripples itself and belies its name."​ [OROM 1920]

"Democracy can never permit science to determine its fundamental purpose, because the integrity of that purpose depends finally upon a consecration of the will, but at the same time democracy on its spiritual side would be impoverished and fruitless without science. The fulfilment of democratic purposes depends upon the existence of relatively authentic knowledge, the authority of which a free man may accept without any compromise of his freedom. [. . . .] Yet just because science is coming to exercise so much authority and be capable of such considerable achievements, a completer measure of industrial and political democracy becomes not merely natural, but necessary. The enormous powers for good and evil which science is bringing into existence cannot be intrusted [sic] to the good-will of any one class of rulers in the community. The community as a whole will not derive full benefit from scientific achievements unless the increased power is widely distributed and until all of the members share in its responsibilities and opportunities." [Croly 1915: 404-405]

[50]  "The persons, then, who come forward in the dawn of the 20th century to help in the ruling of men must come with the firm conviction that no nation, race, or sex, has a monopoly of ability or ideas; that no human group is so small as to deserve to be ignored as a part, and as an integral and respected part, of the mass of men; that, above all, no group of twelve million black folk, even though they are at the physical mercy of a hundred million white majority, can be deprived of a voice in their government and of the right to self-development without a blow at the very foundations of all democracy and all human uplift; that the very criticism aimed today at universal suffrage is in reality a demand for power on the part of consciously efficient minorities, — but these minorities face a fatal blunder when they assume that less democracy will give them and their kind greater efficiency. However desperate the temptation, no modern nation can shut the gates of opportunity in the face of its women, its peasants, its laborers, or its socially damned. How astounded the future world-citizen will be to know that as late as 1918 great and civilized nations were making desperate endeavor to confine the development of ability and individuality to one sex, — that is, to one-half of the nation; and he will probably learn that similar effort to confine humanity to one race lasted a hundred years longer." [OROM 1920: ¶ 50]

"On the other hand, in the valleys of the hard, unyielding laws of matter and the social necessities of time production, and human intercourse, the limits on our freedom are stern and unbending if we would exist and thrive. This does not say that everything here is governed by incontrovertible "natural" law which needs no human decision as to raw materials, machinery, prices, wages, news-dissemination, education of children, etc.; but it does mean that decisions here must be limited by brute facts and based on science and human wants." [OROM 1920: ¶ 57]

[27]  "Thus it is the bounden duty of black America to begin this great work of the creation of Beauty, of the preservation of Beauty, of the realization of Beauty, and we must use in this work all the methods that men have used before. And what have been the tools of the artist in times gone by? First of all, he has used the Truth — not for the sake of truth, not as a scientist seeking truth, but as one upon whom Truth eternally thrusts itself as the highest handmaid of imagination, as the one great vehicle of universal understanding. Again artists have used Goodness — goodness in all its aspects of justice, honor and right — not for sake of an ethical sanction but as the one true method of gaining sympathy and human interest.

[28]  "The apostle of Beauty thus becomes the apostle of Truth and Right not by choice but by inner and outer compulsion. Free he is but his freedom is ever bounded by Truth and Justice; and slavery only dogs him when he is denied the right to tell the Truth or recognize an ideal of Justice.

[29]  "Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent."​ [CNA 1926; Cap­i­tal­i­za­tion in the original]

"HE who would tell a tale must look toward three ideals: to tell it well, to tell it beautifully, and to tell the truth. The first is the Gift of God, the second is the Vision of Genius, but the third is the Reward of Honesty.

"In The Quest of the Silver Fleece there is little, I ween, divine or ingenious; but, at least, I have been honest. In no fact or picture have I consciously set down aught the counterpart of which I have not seen or known; and what ever the finished picture may lack of completeness, this lack is due now to the story-teller, now to the artist, but never to the herald of the Truth." [QSF 1911; Cap­i­tal­i­za­tion in the original]

"When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles [dis­cussed in the book], what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school meta­physics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning [via mathe­matics] concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experi­mental reasoning [via science] con­cern­ing matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. [Hume, An Enquiry Con­cerning Human Under­standing 1748/1777 [2008], Section 12.34; Italics and punctuation in the original]

"[I]t is not the positive propaganda of people who believe white blood divine, infallible and holy to which I object. It is the denial of a similar right of propa­ganda to those who believe black blood human, lovable and inspired with new ideals for the world." [CNA 1926: ¶ 32]

"It may well be asked, and as one who has done some historical research I join in the asking, why should one tamper with history at all in order to write truth? The answer of course is Never, if exact truth can otherwise be ascertained. But every historian is painfully aware how little the scientist today can know accurately of the past; how dependence on documents and memory leaves us all with the tale of the past half told or less. The temptation then comes to pretend we know far more than we do and to set down as accurate history that which is not demonstrably true. To me it seems wiser and fairer to interpret historical truth by the use of creative imagination, provided the method is acknowledged and clear.

"When in this world we seek the truth about what men have thought and felt and done, we face insuperable difficulties. We seldom can see enough of human action at first hand to interpret it properly. We can never know current personal thought and emotion with sufficient understanding rightly to weigh its cause and effect. After action and feeling and reflection are long past, then from writing and memory we may secure some picture of the total truth, but it will be sorely imperfect, with much omitted, much forgotten, much distorted." [PSOM 1957: ¶¶ 2-3]

[4]  "This is the eternal paradox of history. There is but one way to meet this clouding of facts and that is by the use of imagination where documented material and personal experience are lacking.

[5]  "In the great tragedy of Negro slavery in the United States and its aftermath, much of documented history is lacking because of the deep feeling involved and the fierce desire of men to defend their fathers and themselves. This I have sought to correct in my study of the slave trade and of Reconstruction. If I had had time and money, I would have continued this pure historical research. But this opportunity failed and Time is running out. Yet I would rescue from my long experience something of what I have learned and conjectured and thus I am trying by the method of historical fiction to complete the cycle of history which has for a half century engaged my thought, research and action.

[6] "I have personally lived through much of the history of the American Negro from 1876 to 1956. Yet wide as my experience has been, by travel, seeing, hearing and knowing, I of course actually knew but an infinitesimal fraction of all that happened. The gaps of knowledge I can in part supply by the memory of others, by reading published and unpublished matter. Yet with all this I am far from being able to set down an accurate historical account of those fatal eighty years.

[7]  "Therefore I have assayed first to gather such verifiable facts as I can. This body of knowledge I have compared with the reports of others. But even with all this, much, indeed most, is missing: just what men thought, the actual words they used, the feelings and motives which impelled them — those I do not know and most of them none will ever know. These facts are gone forever. But it is possible for the creative artist to imagine something of such unknown truth. If he is lucky or inspired, he may write a story which may set down a fair version of the truth of an era, or a group of facts about human history.

[8]  "This I have attempted to do: adhering as closely as I can to historic fact so far as I can ascertain. I have added the fiction of interpretation so as to make a reasonable story. I may have blundered in places; I may have widely misinterpreted what seemed truth to me. But I have tried and I believe the effort was worth while." [PSOM 1957: ¶¶ 4-8]

"Often we do not surrender our conception of what is true. We refuse to face the newly discovered facts. We declare that they are false and we will not allow persons to talk about them or advocate them. Why do we do this? It is because of fear. We fear the ghosts of our fathers. These fathers said this and we always follow what they said. what they said must be true - we dare not alter it, even if we know it is false. Or again we fear for the future of our children. We are asked by these children to tell them what is true; can we dare tell them that we do not know? That we think that this or that is true, but that [it {rww}] is possible that we are misled? That we can only be certain as we continue to search for facts and as those facts confirm what we have called the truth?" [SHMA undated, ca. 1946: pp.3-4]