C WRIGHT Mills' concept of the "sociological imagination"-a contempo* rary fashionable equivalent to Charles H. Cooley's somewhat more comprehensive "sympathetic introspection" of fifty years ago-has proved to be valuable for understanding one of the scientific operations of the sociologist. This is the operation of selecting out from the seamless web of social reality that which is theoretically significant and socially meaningful for research and for relationship to other researchable variables. It involves a recognition that the best methods and techniques of research can yield no knowledge by themselves; the scientist must imagine correct hypotheses before he can prove (by other means) that they are correct and, to help him in this, he must relate himself in an optimal way to the cumulative knowledge of his discipline and to its application in practical social situations. He must relate himself to the data in such a way that he performs a creative act as he develops concepts, classifications, tests, comparisons, and conclusions for them. The thesis of the present paper is that there is not merely one sociological imagination, but rather several kinds, and often they do not reside happily together in the same person. We shall start by drawing a distinction between two kinds of sociological imagination, found (if they are found at all)