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GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
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GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
AN EXPOSITION OF THE MAIN DEVELOPMENT
IN SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY FROM
SPENCER TO RATZENHOFER
ALBION W. SMALL
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO, ILUNOIS
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PREFACE
Treatises always have their place, but one may venture the belief that, in the present stage of socidogical thought, there is more use for the humbler service of a conspectus. There is more in common between the scattered forces of sociology than can easily be made to appear. Differences of empha^ create illusions of separateness, and even antagonism, where there is only division of labor. Disagreements about details of fact or method cover up unities in fundamental conception. A dis- tinctive social philosophy is already here, and the sociologists accept it more generally than most of their number realize. We need claim for it no more than that it is a point of view, first about the reality in question, and second about ways of inquiring into the reality.
This philosophy has happily as yet a yery meager doctrinal content, as distinguished from its literature of scope and method. It is the more free to grow into a commanding scien- tific technique. Whoever attempts to map^the present outlook of sociology will, of course, put his own limitations on exhibit; but even a rude chart of present sociology will doubtless pay for itself in helping others presently to make a better cme. The following outline, accordingly, contains die skeleton of a lec- ture course occupying four hours a week for an academic year, and of a program of seminar work in sociok)gical methodology continuing through three years. The outline also represents, in a general way, the point of view occupied by my colleagues in the Department of Sociobgy in the University of Chicago. Of course, they are in no way req[)onsiUe for anything whkh this syllabus ccmtains, and I do not know to what extent their conclusions about details may differ from those here indicated. The course of lecture and seminar study to which the pres- ent argument is an introduction constitutes one of several
vi PREFACE
lines of approach by which graduate students are introduced to research in sociology in the University of Chicago. The contents of this book are just what they purport to be — the actual working syllabus of the course. In form it is rough, fragmentary, unsymmetrical. Quite likely the portions which are worked out most in detail will for that reason seem to be appraised by the author above their relative worth. Both intrinsically and in my own estimate, however, these parts of the outline may be quite subordinate and incidental to others which the syllabus merely mentions by title. It is hoped that the table of contents will serve in some measure to correct apparent errors of perspective in the text. The things said and left unsaid in the syllabus are no criterion of the relative values assigned to the subjects so disproportionately discussed. They merely represent certain didactic conveniences. For practical purposes certain things need more than others to be registered in shape for ready reference. Other things which are perhaps more important may then be attended to with better results.
The main objects of this syllabus are, first, to make visible different elements that must necessarily find their place in ultimate sociological theory ; and, second, to serve as an index to relations between the parts and the whole of sociological science.
Innumerable sociologists have asserted, and are still assert- ing, not merely that the portion of knowledge, or the phase of knowledge, about which they are primarily interested is a part of sociology, but that it, and it alone, is sociology. These conflicting prophets tend either to divide their disciples into narrow and intolerant sects, or to confuse all who attempt to reconcile apparent contradictions in their doctrines. The aim of this syllabus is not to exploit another of these competing systems of sociology, but to bring into view the field of knowl- edge which all sociologists have instinctively attempted to sur- vey. The aim is, further, to show how the different attempts to gain knowledge of this field actually supplement and rein- force each other. They have not been systematic or intentional
PREFACE vii
divisions of labor. They have rather been unorganized and wasteful. Nevertheless, enough work has been done to demon- strate an essential reason for all the seemingly unrelated effort. There is knowledge to be gained. Many men have been in quest of it from many points of approach. The result is increasing definiteness of perception as to the precise knowl- edge needed, and clearer recognition of the reciprocal depend- ence of the different plans for gaining the knowledge.^ '
In a word, whether we will or no, men's thoughts are pass- ing under the control of a distinctly new conception of human life — its facts, its meanings, its moral implications, and the resources for realizing the purposes given in this latest world- interpretation. Psychology and sociology are the most impor- tant media through which this new thought is finding expres- sion. It is not worth while to attempt at this point to say how function and merit are divided between them. Enough that psychology and sociology, both immature, are together formu- lating a "world-consciousness" in a way which must surely set off the epoch upon which we have entered from all the thought-eras that have preceded.
Comparatively few men are aware of this radical shifting of view ; but because of it there is already going on, and there must continue to go on, a general rethinking of all our theories, from our most concrete economic and political and legal poli- cies, to our logic and our theologies and our metaphysics.
In the aggregate the sociologists have already done much to answer the question : What, and how, and to what purpose, is association of human beings with each other ? This syllabus attempts not merely to report these results, but to correlate them in a constructive way. It is an attempt both to give the layman a general idea of the ground covered by sociological theory, and to orient the student who wishes to prepare him- self for independent sociological research;
For both of these reasons the syllabus is deliberately not a
*Cf. "A Decade of Sociology/' American Journal of Sociology, VoL XI, p. z.
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bibliography. If is easy to bewilder and discourage both lay* men and yocmg specialists by revealing the already unwieldy mass of sociologies literature. If this is to be ventured at all, it shocfid be by degrees, in connection with special divisions of the subject. In this discussion references to the literature have been limited strictly by the immediate demands of the argu* ment.
One further purpose of the syllabus may be distinctly avowed. It is a fraxde address to the whole fellowship of scholars throughout the social science. It is an argument to the effect diat knowledgi? of any portion or aspect of htmaai experience is deceptive, if it is not correlated with knowledge of alt the other phases of experience that help to mal^ the whole- ness of life, and if it is not set in its proportional place in a scale of knowledge reaching from the minutest detail of individual experience to the most inclusive wodd-pfaikisophy. A sociolc^ is abortive, if it is not a higher correlation and generalization of all the kinds of knowledge about men whidi are derived from more intensive observation of abstracted phases of life. The special social sciences are mere dissections of dead tissue, if they do not relate themselves at last to a common sociology. Our task, then, is to show how far the sociok)gists have gone toward establi^ing a point of view that wilt reveal the actual world in which real men have their life- problems.
The explanatory clause in the title should account for the nature of the references, in the foltowing pages, to other socio* logical writers. As the book does not profess to contain a system of sociology, bat merely an argument to indicate the line of action whidi may ultimately wotk out a credible sys* tern ; so it equally disclaims the intentk>n of proposing even an outline of a history of sociology. The two chapters entitled "The History of Sociology" merely sketdi a few historical factors which have peculiarly intimate connections with the main Kne of development that the body of the argument attempts to explain. If the proper task of an historian had been
PREFACE tx
tmdertaken, it would have been necessary to place the work of every writer mentioned^ and of many not named, in a per- spective quite different frcnn that in which it appears, or fails to appear, in this syllabus. Much work of first-rate impor- tance for general sociology can nevertheless not be used to advantage in a rapid survey of the tnmk line of development in recent sociological theory. CXir thesis is that the central line in the path of methodological progress, from Spencer to Ratzenhofer, is marked by gradual lifting of effort from analogical representation of social structures to real analysis of social processes. I have not even presumed to pronounce upon the relative claims of different scholars to credit for this change ; still less to compare the importance of work directly upon this primary method with that of men who have been engaged upon more special inquiries. My attempt has been simply to expound the change itself, and its bearing upon cer- tain prime factors in sociological problems. With this pur- pose in view, I have tnade use of material most directly in point An adequate history of sociology may recognize intrin- sically superior merit in a large amount of work not brought into focus from the present center of attention.
Forestudies for considerable portions of this syllabus have appeared from time to time since^iQOO in the American Journal of Sociology. The substance of Part VIII was printed, under the title The Significance of Sociology for Ethics, in the "Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago," Vol. IV, and also as a separate monograph.
JUNB X, 1905.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART I. INTRODUCTION
MOB
Chaftbr I. The Subject-Matter of Sociology .... 3
Ch^^pter II. Definitions of Sociology 23
Chapter III. The Impulse of Sociology 36
Chapter IV. The History of Sociology 40
Chapter V. The History of Sociology (continued) ... 63
Chapter VI. The Problems of Sociology . ' . . 98
PART II. SOCIETY CONSIDERED AS A WHOLE COMPOSED OF DEFINITELY ARRANGED PARTS (STRUCTURE)
(An Interpretation of Herbert Spencer)
Chapter Vtl. The Place of Spencer in Sociology ... 109
Chapter VIII. Spencer's Analysis of Society 115
Chapter IX. The Value of Spencer's Method .... 130
PART III. SOCIETY CONSIDERED AS A WHOLE COMPOSED OF PARTS WORKING TOGETHER TO ACHIEVE
RESULTS (FUNCTION)
(An Interpretation of SchaMe)
Chapter X. A Conspectus of Schaffle's Scheme . Chapter XI. The Value of Schaffle's Method . '
157 167
PART IV. SOaETY CONSIDERED AS A PROCESS OF ADJUST- MENT BY CONFLICT BETWEEN ASSOCIATED
INDIVIDUALS
(An Interpretation of Ratgenhofer)
The Problem Restated Ratzenhofer's Epitome of His Theory Elements of the Social Process . The Nature of the Social Process The Primitive Social Process Stages of the Sodal Process The Social Process in Civic Groups The Latent Antagonisms in States
zi
183 189 196 aoi 207 213 224 242
\ •
xii CONTENTS
fAOB
Chaftbr XX. Types of Antagonistic Interests in States . • 249 Chapter XXI. Types of Antagonistic Interests in States (con-
tmutd) «••••.•• 265 Chapter XXII. Typical Conflicts of Interest in the SUte . • 98i Chapter XXIII. Typical Conflicts of Interest in the State (con- tinued) 304
PART V. SOQETY CONSIDERED AS A PROCESS OF ADJUST- MENT BY CO-OPERATION BETWEEN ASSOCIATED
INDIVIDUALS
(Further Interpretation of RaUenhofer)
Chapter XXIV. General Survey ^3^5
Cbapibk XXV. The Content of the Social Process . • • 344 Chapter XXVI. The Transition from Struggle to Co-operation • 357 Chapter XXVII. The Actual Conflict of Interests in Modem
Society « . . 372
PART VI. CONSPECTUS OF CONCEPTS DERIVED BY ANALYSIS OF THE SOCIAL PROCESS
Chapter XXVIII. Relation of Part VI to the Whole Argument . 397 Chapter XXIX. Schedule of Sociological Concepts . • . 401 Chapter XXX. The Conditions of Society; the Elements of
Society; Society; the Physical Environment 404
Chapter XXXI. Interests 425
Chapter XXXII. The Individual 443
Chapter XXXIIL The Spiritual Environment; Contacts; Differ- entiation; Group; Form of the Group; Conflict; Social Situations ..^481 Chapter XXXIV. Association; the Social; the Social Procesa . 501 Chapter XXXV. Social Structure; Social Functions; Social
Forces; Social Ends; Subjective Envinxi- ment; Social Consciousness; the Socio- logical Point of Vieir .... $24 Chapter XXXVX Some Incidents ol the Social Process . $59
Chapter XXXVII. Some Incidents of the Social Process (con-
timued) A
PART VII. THE SOCLVL PROCESS CONSIDERED AS A SYSTEM OF PSYCHICAL PROBLEMS
Chapter XXXVIII. The Relation of Part VH to the Previous
Argument 619
CONTENTS xiil
PAGS
Cbapicr XXXIX. The Elements of Social Causation 626
Chapisr XL. The Initial Problems of Social Psychology . 640
PART VIII. THE SOCIAL PROCESS CONSIDERED AS A
SYSTEM OF ETHICAL PROBLEMS
Chapter XLI. Current Confusion of Moral Standards . • 653
Chaptbr XLII. The Unknown Quantity in Moral Problems • 662
CHAPm XLIII. The Logical Form of Moral Judgments . 666 Chapieb XLIV. The Relation of the Process-Conception of Life
to Moral Judgments 674
Cbafier XLV. The Sociological Content of Moral Judgments . . 678
Cbapikr XLVI. Working Tests of Ethical Valuations • 686
Chaftes XLVII. Sociological Prerequisites for Ethical Valuation 690 Chapter XLVIII. Categorical and Telic Valuations Contrasted in
the Case of Temperance ... tgj
PART IX. THE SOaAL PROCESS CONSIDERED AS A SYSTEM OF TECHNICAL PROBLEMS
Chapieb XLIX. The Premises of Practical Sociology • • 705
Chapter L. Social Achievement in the United States .* . 718
LI. Conclusion 7a8
;
PART I INTRODUCTION
• •,
• .•
CHAPTER I
THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF SOCIOLOGY/*
The proposition to be developed in this chapter, arkl thhn ^ in greater detail throughout the syllabus, is that the subj^cfr; .- matter of sociology is the process of human association} ' •' :
Ever since Comte proposed the name "sociology," and parallel with all subsequent attempts to give the term a definite content, one mode of attack upon the proposed science has been denial that it could have a subject-matter not already pre- empted by other sciences. This sort of attack has been encouraged by the seemingly hopeless disagreement among sociologists about the scientific task that they were trying to perform. If sociology has had anything to say about primitive peoples, for instance, it has been accused of violating the terri- tory of anthropology and ethnology. If it has dealt with evi- dence recorded by civilized races, it has been charged with invading the province of the historian. If it has touched upon the relations of social classes in modem times, the political scientist or the economist has warned it to cease infringing upon his monopoly. Thus sociology has seemed to workers in other sciences either a pseudo-science, attempting to get pres- tige in their own fields by exploiting quack methods, or a
^The idea of human association as a process has been familiar to philosophers since Hegel, but hardly in a realistic sense. From abstract dialectics to socialistic agitation, the idea has had a certain vogue and influ- ence. It would not be difficult to show that all the sociologists since Comte have more or less consciously assumed this concept as their major premise. So far as I am aware, the theorem of this chapter was first formulated by Professor E. C. Hayes, in a monograph written in 1902, and published, under .«. the title '' Sociological Construction Lines," in the American Journal of Sociology, Vol. X, pp. 603 and 750* Professor Ross had virtually assumed the above formula, though he did not directly declare it, in the American Journal of Sociology, Vol. IX, pp. joi if. (cf. Foundations of Sociology, p. 91), and his projected book on social processes will go far toward promoting the theorem from the rank of a neologism to that of a commonplace.
GENERAL '-SOCIOLOGY
mere collector of the- NvaSte' thrown aside by the more important sciences. Soci^lo^'^ts themselves have unintentionally done not a little tp*jcc>hfirm this impression. As has been hinted above^ .their failure to agree upon a definition of their science, or.^t^ori'^ifecise description of their task, has seemed to afford •Dclffsir proof that their alleged science was merely a name with . •:;.. -ills 'corresponding content.'
• • •
'•. • Has sociology a material of its own ? Jealous friends of the
older sciences promptly answer "No." Friends of the new science as confidently answer " Yes ; '* but they have not always been able to justify the answer to each other, or even to themselves.
The formula adopted above is not an individual variation of the many alternatives already proposed as a fair field for a science of sociology. It is rather an interpretation of all the efforts, both within and without the older sciences, which have been prompted by a more or less distinct feeling that there are important reaches of knowledge about human conditions not provided for in the programs of the older sciences. Instead of leading to the conclusion that there is nothing to do which the older sciences do not properly attempt, if the heterogeneous labors of the sociologists are reviewed with a little care they furnish abundant evidence, both that there is unoccupied terri- tory, and that these unsystematized surveys have each actually been doing some of the necessary work of plotting the ground.
The proposition which we are now supporting is not that the sociologists ought to fix upon a new material as the subject- matter of their science. In fact, the sociologists have long ago instinctively fixed upon their material, and its peculiar char- acter is gradually beginning to appear. The subject-matter
* The most recent betrayal of this judgment may be seen in a discussion of two papers by Mr. Victor Branford and Professor Durkhdm on " The Relation of Sociology to the Social Sciences and to Philosophy " (vide AfMrican Journal of Sociology f Vol. X, pp. 134 ff. and 256 ff.). The differences of opinion and vagueness of view betrayed in the discussion fairly reflect the prevailing state of mind as to the subject-matter df sociology, even among persons who have given more than casual attention to recent sociological literature.
1
THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF SOCIOLOGY 5
upon which the sociologists are engaged is the social process as t a whole. This is to be sharply distinguished, on the one hand,
from mere knowledge of isolated phencmiena, or classes of phenomena, that take place among men; and it is also to be distinguished from mere knowledge of immediate relaticMis that may be abstracted from the whole complex of relations which make up the entire fabric of human life. The former kind of knowledge is description, narrative, story, tradition, that does not rise to the generality of science. The latter kind of knowledge may be organized into science of a certain order of generality. This has occurred, schematically at least, in the case of the accepted social sciences — ethnology, history, eco- I nomics, etc. The sociologists are attempting to develop a gen-
eral science which will have relations to the special social sciences analogous with the relations of general physics to the special physical sciences, on the one hand, and to the various physical technologies, on the other ; or analogous with the rela- tions of general chemistry to subdivisions of chemistry, or the relations of general biology to subordinate sections of biology. Comparisons of this sort are so loose that they might easily prejudice the case under discussion. They are merely illustra- tions, necessarily inexact, but presenting certain instructive parallels. Let us suppose that, at a certain stage in the develop- ment of the science of physics, investigators had acquired con- siderable amounts of knowledge about groups of physical phe- nomena determined by relatively superficial marks. Let us suppose that one type of physicists had specialized upon gravi- tation, with the least possible attention to all other phases of physical phenomena. Suppose another type had in the same way confined attention to the phenomena of light ; another, to those of magnetism ; etc. Suppose that in each case the knowl- edge gained by such abstraction had been carefully system- atized. This whole body of knowledge would doubtless have had a certain value. Obviously that value would have been narrowly limited, however, because such arbitrary isolation of things that are essentially related is possible only so long as
6 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
insight into the real facts is rudimentary. Modem physics could not come into existence until, by some means or other, students of these things had learned to entertain the idea of the unity of their phenomena, resting in an underlying unity of substance manifesting the phenomena. That is, there could be only superficial arrangements of amateurish observation, not respectable science, until a unifying tonception gave coherence to the details observed. Thus the conception of matter, and of the molar and molecular processes of matter, might have arisen after a long history of such unconcerted specialization as we have supposed. These conceptions would presently serve as bonds of connection between the scattered workers. They would serve as clues to common interests between them. They would lead to meanings previously undiscovered in the phenomena, and they would promote further investigation of the phenomena. Thus, in place of desultory pursuit of knowl- edge about interesting physical facts, there would arise a science of physics. Although the actual development of physics has not literally followed this order, the essential development has involved virtually the above stages. Consciousness of a subject-matter, cm the one hand manifesting diverse phe- nomena, and on the other hand strictly delimited from other subject-matter, has been a precondition of a science of physics at once comprehensive and independent.
We may vary the form of the illustration in the case of chemistry. Suppose something like our present knowledge of chemical occurrences had grown up before there was any such generalization as " matter " or " atomic phenomena." Suppose some men had by some sort of intuition grouped the metals together, and had observed their behavior under different cir- cumstances. Suppose others had studied salts, others acids, etc. Again we should have had a certain grade of knowledge, in a certain system of arrangement ; but we should have had no science of chemistry. There must first have arisen a conception of an order of phenomena common to all matter, and conform- ing to laws varying merely in details according to the com-
J
I
THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF SOCIOLOGY 7
position and circumstances of the particular portions of matter in questicHi. Otherwise more or less interesting information about capriciously distinguished sorts of matter could never attain the dignity of a science of chemistry.
The like is true of biology, and the literal history of biology has perhaps more obviously conformed to the logical necessity we are citing than the history of physics or chemistry. The "natural history" still found in many schools harks back to conceptions of the organic world which are logically neither more nor less respectable than the traditional English farmer's division of the animal kingdom into ''game, vermin, and stock/* No matter how patiently one type of men studies plants, and another reptiles, and another fishes, and another birds, and another beasts, and so on, neither one nor all of them could go much beyond advertising the need of a biological science which did not exist. In order that dilettantish natural history might pass over into positive biology, it was necessary that all observation of living nature should submit to control by an antecedent conception of organic matter and laws of the variation of its phenomena.
In a word, whatever the chronological order of occurrence of the ideas, all the concrete and special knowledge that goes to make up our present sciences has been unified at last around some central conception of subject-matter and appropriate method. We may express the fact for our present purposes in the formula : Physics is the science of matter in its molar and molecular processes; chemistry is the science of matter in its atomic processes ; biology is the science of matter in its organic processes. In each case the comprehensive science has the task of organizing details which may already have been studied separately by several varieties of scholars.
The same logical methods which have arrived at these generalizations make irresistibly toward the conviction that coherence and unity of knowledge about human experience demand a science of men in their associational processes. Many of these processes have long been studied in detail, but
8 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
Study of them in their correlations is, as in the case of chemi- cal and vital processes, the work of a distinct order of science, with a peculiar object of attention. To the range of general- ization which the needed general science comprehends in the present case, the men who have most felt the need apply the name sociology.
Without referring to details which might further guard this summary comparison, our present interest is in the fact to be illustrated in the case of sociology. The phenomena pre- sented by human beings have been studied in ways which are on the same logical plane with the treatment of organic phe- nomena by the obsolete typts of "natural history." Not to mention the lesser social sciences, conventional history and economics and ethics, as represented by still extant types of thinkers, are sometimes as fragmentary and* unvital and uncen- tered as a "science" of garden vegetables or of draft-horses would be, if not correlated with larger knowledge. The sociologists represent a protest against this situation. The pro- test has been long in developing out of the spontaneous, inar- ticulate stage. It is rapidly finding its voice. The formula which we are emphasizing expresses the implicit assumption of all the sociologists who are to be taken seriously. If they could, they would materially weaken the force of the names used to designate the conventional divisions of sciences pertain- ing to man. The past and present convenience of these names, and of the academic classifications for which they stand, is counterbalanced by the obstructions which they oppose to the progress of real knowledge. They interfere with discovery that all serious students of society are investigating phases of the same subject-matter. The supreme need in the human sciences at the present moment is to make out what that one subject-matter is, and how the different kinds of. research are related to it. This central and comprehensive reality appears to the sociologists as the associational process.
Wherever there are human beings there are phenomena of association. Those phenomena constitute a process composed
THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF SOCIOLOGY 9
of processes. There can be no convincing science of human life till these processes are known, from least to greatest, in the relation of each to each and to all. Knowledge of human life which stops short of this is at best a fragment, and at worst a fiction. Hence we assert that studies of selected phases of human affairs, no matter how ancient and awful the tradition that sponsors them, are logically in the class of pseudo-sciences, until they take their place within the plexus of sciences which together interpret the whole process of human association.
Men who call themselves by either of the names that signify attachment to either of the traditional divisions of knowledge are at liberty to define their intellectual interests for themselves, and to shape their individual pursuits accordingly. Thus cer- tain interests may posit a "science" of archaeology; others, a "science" of epigraphy; others, a "science" of cartc^aphy; others, a " science " of numismatology ; and so on, up to his- tory, and law, and economics, and cosmic philosophy. Men of each type may cultivate their peculiar section of knowledge as though it outranked every other kind of knowledge. Not group-provincialisms, however, but the reality of objective relations, must determine at last whether a selected portion of knowledge is relatively a fragment or a whole, relatively insig- nificant or important. No incident, phase, machinery, institu- tion, product, stage, or program of human life is central enough to clothe knowledge of it with more than the rank of a tributary science. The process that is taking place among men, through the ages and across the ages, is the largest whole of which men can have positive knowledge. This whole consequently fixes die goal of complete science of human life. No less than this whole is contemplated by the sociologist as his aim. He neces- sarily represents a desired generalization of knowledge which is farther than any other scientific program from actual or probable completion. Sociology thus defined is, and must remain, more a determining point of view than a finished body of knowledge. At the same time, and by virtue of both these sides of its case, sociology exposes the relativity and the par-
10 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
tialness of any body of knowledge which ccnnprehends less than the full sweep of the social process. Whatever be the appraisal of the fractional sciences in the subjective estimate of their pro- moters, the objective importance of each of them is measured by the kind and amount of tribute it can bring to knowledge of the human process as a whole.
These conceptions have been expressed in such general terms that repetition in less abstract form may not be super- fluous. Wherever two or more human beings are within each other's ken, there is set up between them action and reaction, exchange of influence of some sort or other. That influence, on the one hand, molds the individuals concerned, tending to make, unmake, remake them without end; and, on the other hand, it composes those individuals into more or less rigid group-relationships, perhaps after having decomposed previous relationships to another group. This reciprocating process, growing infinitely complex as the circle of association widens, and as the tjrpe of individual becomes more and more evolved — including, besides its form, the content of the process, first in the evolving objective conditions within which the associa- tion takes place, second in the developing consciousness of the persons engaged in the process — this is the human reality, and all knowledge of human conditions is abortive in the degree in which it fails to fill out a complete expression of this reality.
Let us suppose the savage man A, and the savage woman B, of the horde X. Their wants are few. Food is plenty. B supplies it for A, who eats till he is satisfied, and treats his food-getter with tolerable gentleness. But the food grows scarce. The horde breaks up into foraging pairs. A and B wander beyond their usual haunts, and encounter the savage man C of horde Y. They had never met before. To an impartial observer there is little to distinguish the savage A from the savage C. Up to date all the ferocity which we asso- ciate with the word "savage" may have been dormant in both. In each other's presence new factors of stimulation and response begin to operate. Each wants food. Each wants the
THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF SOCIOLOGY ii
woman. Each wants to eliminate the other. Treating the woman as merely a passive factor, we have in action rudiments of the universal process of association, viz., antithesis of indi- viduals, stimulus of one by the other, through the medium of common or conflicting wants, self-assertion by the opposing individuals, resulting reconstruction of the individuals them- selves. That is, they fight ; one prevails, and is transformed from a socially indifferent personality into a master ; the other yields, and is transformed from a socially indifferent person- ality into a slave. The group is changed from a diad into a triad. Both A and B, we may suppose, become subject to C, while the relation of neither A nor B to C is precisely identical with the previous relation of A and B to each other.
This process of individual and group-reaction, remaking both the individuals and the groups, extends from the savage group of two or more, to the most comprehensive and complex group of groups which ultimate civilization may develop. It is incessant. It is perpetually varying. It is the main ifiovement, within which migrations, race-mixtures, wars, governments, constitutions, revolutions, reformations, federations, civiliza- tions, are merely the more or less important episodes, or situa- tions, or factors. This whole process is the supreme fact within the reach of human knowledge. It is the final inter- preter of each and every lesser fact which may attract human attention. Since this process, from beginning to end, from component to completeness, in its forms and in its forces, in its origins, its variations, and its tendencies, is the subject-matter which sociology proposes to investigate, the relation of every other science to sociology is fixed, not by the dictum of any scientist, but oy the relation which the stibject-matter and the methods of other sciences bear to knowledge of the entire social process.
To make the point more precise, we may distinguish the work of sociology in turn from that of ethnology, of history, and of economics. Before passing to these specifications, or illustrations, we must provide for all necessary corrections of
12 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
the personal equation. We will not assume, whether to the advantage or the disadvantage of either science, that any single man, still less a single fragment of his work, fairly represents the whole of his science. We will not eveii venture to assume that our use of the material to be cited for illustration gives all the credit due to the writer from whom it is taken. His own views of the final correlation of that material with other sub- jects of knowledge may be quite unobjectionable. Our purpose is merely to illustrate the point that, in the form in which it appears in a given version of one of these sciences, the same objective material may have no interest whatever for sociology, or, on the other hand, it may be viewed in such relations as, at one and the same time, to furnish subject-matter for one of these sciences and also for sociology. To express the case from the point of view of desirability, as I see it, and of ulti- mate adjustment, as I predict it, there will presently be no apparently statical dualism or multipleism between the subject- matter of the other human sciences and that of sociology. When every student of human life realizes that the reality which he tries to know is a one, not a many, each will regard the material of his immediate science, not as belonging to his science instead of belonging to another science, but as being to some extent the common material of several sciences, or at most as held in trusteeship by his science for its final use in the complete science.
In this spirit we may cite for illustration, first, the little book, Deriiker's The Races of Man.^ The author states his purpose as follows: "My object .... has been to give .... the essential facts of the twin sciences of anthropology and ethnography" (Preface). In carrying out this purpose a chapter is devoted to each of the following subjects: " Somatic Characters ; " " Morphological Characters ; " " Physiological Characters ; " " Ethnic Characters ; " " Lin- guistic Characters;" "Sociological Characters" (a chapter each on " Material Life," " Psychic Life," " Family Life," and
'London, 1900.
4
THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF SOCIOLOGY 13
. "Social Life"); "Classification of Races and Peoples;"
"Races and Peoples of Europe;" "Races and Peoples of Asia ; " " Races and Peoples of Africa ; " " Races and Peoples of Ckreania;" "Races and Peoples of America."
Without passing judgment upon the expressed or implied correlations in which the author views this material, we may repeat our abstract propositions in terms of the particulars which he schedules. If there be a science or sciences that are content to discover, describe, compare, and classify such details as these, and therewith to let the matter rest, such sciences may be credited with a preserve of their own, from which sociology holds itself unconcernedly aloof. With these details, simply I as details, or merely as foils reciprocally to display each other
as curiosities, sociology has no manner of concern. If the items thus considered are the subject-matter of any science, sociology is not likely to disturb either it» possession or its title.
On the other hand, every one of these details has occurred somewhere along in the course of the process in which rudi- mentary men, and rudimentary human associations, evolve into developed personalities and complex associations. With the whence, and the how, and the why, and the whither of this process, sociology is supremely concerned. If any of the details in question can be brought into such visible relation with this social process, and in the precise measure in which they can be made to shed light upon the process, they come within the scope of sociology. Thus the most spectacular detail, like a racial peculiarity, or a ceremonial anomaly which remains unaccounted for, may be the chief pride and the center of attraction in an ethnological museum. It would have no value at all for sociology. If, however, it could be made to yield any evidence whatever about the facts, or the forms, or the forces, or the conditions, or the laws of the social process, to just that extent it would come to be the common material of sociology and of the science which exhibits it in the museum.
In the same way we may distinguish between the object of attention in sociology and the subject-matter beyond which cer-
14 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
tain types of mind do not pry in studying history.* Let us refer to one of the most respected among English historians. In his Constitutional History of England, Vol. I, chap. 9, "The Norman G>nquest," Bishop Stubbs presents the subject under the following minor titles: "Complex Results of the Con- quest;" "State of Normandy;" "Growth of Feudalism;" "Feudal Ideas of the Conquest;" "National Policy of Wil- liam;" "Introduction of Feudal Usages;" "Maintenance of Old Forms ; " " Results of Changes of Administrators ; " " Sub- ordinate Changes : in Judicature, in Taxation, in Ecclesiastical Affairs;" "Transitional Character of the Period."
We are citing an author who is among the least liable to the charge of belonging to the former of the two types just
*Aa I have implied above, the point of view which we are explaining assumes that, when studies of the sopial reality are properly centered, we shall no longer speak as though the ethnologists were studying one thing, the his- torians another, the economists another, the sociologists another, etc., etc. We shall perceive that, if we are using a valid method, so far as we are actually contributing to real knowledge, rather than practicing an art, or indulging in play, we are in fact all studying the same thing. Our particular task will require primary attention to certain fragments or aspects of the one thing. It will always be understood, however, that our results have to be completed by assimilating, within the entire report, the whole made up by correlation of the results of all research. Accordingly I am trying to avoid a use of language which carries the old implications. I do not want to say : " Ethnology deals with this subject-matter, history with that, economics with the other, etc." I want to say, rather, that certain material with which historians concern themselves may be treated by the historians in such a way that it satisfies no general human interest, and for that reason has no value for the sociologist. That same material may be treated by other historians in such a way that, so far as it goes, it ^both explains and is explained by the whole social process. If the former occurs, there is no fellowship between such historians and the sociologists. If the latter is the case, the names " historian " and " sociologist " woidd be appropriate merely as indicating where the two tsrpes of scholars respectively place the primary emphasis in their work. The historian would be he who puts most stress upon discovering the facts of past situations. The sociologist would be he who puts most stress upon the correlation of these facts with knowledge of the social process in general. This line of cleavage between typtB of historians was brought out very clearly in a discussion at the joint meeting of the American Economic Association and the Americitta Historical Association at New Orleans, December, 1903 (vide Proceedings of the American Economic Association, Third Series, Vol. V, No. i. Part II).
THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF SOCIOLOGY 15
indicated.^ We are not criticising his work, but abstracting ' from it, for purposes of illustration, a series of familiar topics
which may be treated by either of two contrasted methods. On the one hand, if the items in the series were treated by the one type of historian, a minimum of relationship would appear between either of them and the others, or anything else. Each topic would be discussed very much as a landscape painter snatches fr<xn an environment an "effect'' and puts it on canvas. Volumes full of such detached, impressionistic sketches would go no farther toward making a science of his- tory than an equal bulk of description of detached pieces of rock, culled from different parts of the world, would go toward I making a science of geology. No one with the least impulse
toward generalization can imagine that information of that fragmentary sort is science. It may be worth getting for other purposes than science, and individuals may be as well within their rights in busying themselves with this sort of litter as those who really devote themselves to science. In itself, left in the uncriticised, unorganized, heterogeneous condition of fects set side by side, with no discrimination of relative worth, information about the past is of no more scientific value than the same number of miscellaneous items in the newspaper today.
In the modem literature classed as " history " we accord- ingly find quaint and curious information in all stages of organization, from a minimum to a maximum of coherence. Our argument is that sociology has no part ndv lot with the type of history which is content to find out facts and there rest its case. Like all genuine science, sociology is not interested in facts as such. It is interested only in relations, meanings, valuations, in which facts reappear in essentials. One fact is worth no more than another, if its correlation with other facts is concealed. On the other hand, every fact in human experi- ence has a value of its own as an index of the social process that emerges in part in the fact. In so far as the historian
* Vide note, p. 14.
i6 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
hunts down facts for the purpose of finding the social process revealed in the facts^ his interest is identical with that of the sociologist. The difference between them is again merely a difference of greater or less attention to different steps of one and the same approach to knowledge of the social reality. We might imitate a verbal distinction familiar in a related field, and say that as ethnography is to ethnolc^, so is histori- ography to historiology. I would by no means concede that the subject-matter of sociology is confined to the past. It is still more concerned with interpretation of the social process in the present. This term " historiology " is suggested as a synonym for one segment of the arc of sociology, and inerely as a temporary expedient in this particular part of the argument. To point the contrast between mere discovery of details of past experience, and the work that the sociologists want to do, we may fairly call the former historiography and the latter historiolc^.®
The real progress of the historians toward promotion of science is not in the line of which many of them have recently grown so proud. Hi^ory does not become more scientific by shifting its attention frcftn relatively insignificant kings and sol- diers to equally insignificant common folks. History beoHnes scientific in proportion as it advances from knowledge of details toward reconstruction of the whole in which the details have their place. The sociologists have entered the field of social science with a plea for a fair share of attention to that correla- tion of knowledge, notorious neglect of which has thus far been the paradox of our era of " inductive science." ^
Recurring to the titles from Stubbs, we may add that investigation of such topics may, and indeed must, proceed in
* All this has been anticipated and stated so conclusively by Professor Ross that there remains little room for discussion {xHde American Journal of Sociology, pp. 194 ff., and Foundations of Sociology, chap. 4). Masaryk, Grundlagen des Marxismus, pp. 135 ff., has given energetic expression to similar criticism. Cf. Reich, " Psychological vs. Arm-Ohair Historians," Fortnightly Review, January, 1905.
' Cf. chap. 33, sec. 7, " The Sociological Point of View."
THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF SOCIOLOGY 17
the first instance with severe disregard of collateral details. The test of historical work, however, is not where it begins, but where it ends. It is a misconception of fact, and a misuse of terms, to speak of any program that begins and ends with details as "scientific." Historiography as such is not science; it is merely a technique. The output of that technique is raw material of science. There is no more scientific value in know- ing merely that William the G>nqueror, or William the Red, or any of their successors in past centuries, did this or that, than there is in knowing what Edvyard VII and the Kaiser did on their yachts at Kiel last summer. We do not reach science till we advance from knowledge of what occurred to knowledge of the meaning of what occurred. On the side of the meanings of occurrences, whoever follows connections as far as they can be traced, whether he calls himself historian or sociologist, pursues the essential sociological interest.®
'Tarde charges both historian and sociologist with attention to the par- ticular in disregard of the general. For instance, he says that physicists, chemists, and physiologists " show us the subject of their science only on the side of its characteristic resemblances and repetitions ; they prudently conceal i^ corresponding heterogeneities and transformations (or ^transubstantia- tions)." He then alleges a contrast in the case of the social sciences as follows : " The historian and sociologist, on the contrary, veil the regular and monotonous face of social facts — that part in which they are alike and repeat themselves — and show us only their accidental and interesting, their infinitely novel and diversified, aspect. If our subject were, for example, the Gallo- Romans, the historian, even the philosophical historian, would not think of leading us, step by step, through conquered Gaul in order to show us how every word, rite, edict, profession, custom, craft, law, or military maneuver, how in short every special idea or need which had been introduced from Rome, had begun to spread from the Pyrenees to the Rhine, and to win its way, after more or less vigorous fighdng against old Celtic customs and ideas, to the mouths and arms and hearts and minds of all the enthusiastic Gallic imitators of Rome and Oesar. At any rate, if our historian had once led us on this long journey, he would not make us repeat it for every Latin word or gram- matical form, for every ritualistic form in the Roman religion, for every military maneuver that was taught to the legionaries by their officer-instructors, for every variety of Roman architecture, for temple, basilica, theater, hippo- drome, aqueduct, and atriumed villa, for every school-taught verse of Virgil or Horace, for every Roman law, or for every artistic or industrial process in Roman civilization that had been faithfully and continuously transmitted from
i8 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
Happily it is impossible for the most atomistically minded historiographer utterly to overlook the pointings of each event or situation toward connections with other events and situa- tions. Even a list of topics like the one we have cited at ran- dom testifies of this necessity. " Results," ** state," "growth," "policy," "introduction," "maintenance," "transitional," are all terms of relationship. Moreover, the relationships implied are not merely those of nearness in time or space, nor of series. They are relationships of working-with, of process.® This process may be contemplated merely within an arbitrarily restricted area; e. g., causes and effects so far as they appear in contrasts between the before and the after of relations of classes, of economic systems, of constitutional principles, of legal enactments, of social customs, of religious conventions, in a certain population. In this case there is rudimentary, but narrowly restricted, recognition that specific knowledge gets its value by correlation with other knowledge. The interest of the historian converges toward that of the sociologist in the precise degree in which the former de3ires to advance from knowledge of occurrences as such, not merely to their immediate correla- tions, but to their last discoverable meanings as indexes of the whole process of social evolution. At one extreme is sheer interest in bare details. At the other extreme is interest that rates everything short of dynamic interpretation of the details as mere preliminary.
The same distinction may be stated in terms of discrimina- tion between the economic and the sociological interest. Again, it should be urged with all emphasis that every use of words
pedagogues and craftsmen to pupils and apprentices. And yet it is only at this price that we can get at an exact estimate of the great amount of r^[uLarity which obtains in even the most fluctuating societies." (The Laws of Imitation, English by Parsons; New York, 1903, pp. 8, 9.) Whether Tarde is right or not in grouping historians and sociologists equally under this censure, our point is substantially the one that he makes : viz., that knowledge does not pass from scraps into science until its regularities are recognized and their laws dis- covered. The sociologists rather than the historians are making the fight for use of this theorem in the social sciences.
* Cf. below, chap. 34, sec. '3, " The Social Process."
THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF SOCIOLOGY 19
which implies an exclusive division of subject-matter among the social sciences is merely a convenient concession to a con- dition which the prc^ess of science should at least mitigate. As we have said above, from the sociological view-point differ- ent workers in the social sciences are not working on different kinds of material. They are merely carrying on different divisicHis of labor upon one material. That material is human experience in general. Regardless of the special name by which sections of it are known, the total purpose of social science in general, up to the point where it ceases to be mere knowledge and bq^ns to pass over into power, is to discover the meanings of human experience. CXir present illustraticm I should bring out another real difference between degrees of
approach toward this end.
In his Grundriss der aUgemeinen Volkswirtschaftslekre^^ Bo(^ II, chap. 7, Professor Schmoller draws the outlines of a description of modem forms of industrial enterprise. His sub- titles are as follows: ''The Conception of Industrial Enter- prise (Untemehmung) ;" "Its Starting-Points, Ti-ade, Labor, Community, Family ; " " The Development of Rural Economic Enterprise;" "Hand Labor;" "Movements in the Direction of Larger Enterprises and Organizations in Community and Corporate Form up to 1800;" "Domestic Industry (das Ver- lagssystem) ;" "Modern Enterprise, Wholesale Business, the Factory; " " The Social Problem of Large Business; " " Public Stock Companies;" "The Newer Economic Associations;" "The Combinations of Traders and Promoters, Syndicates, Rings, and Trusts;" "Conclusion, Bird's-eye View of the Social Constitution of Industry, Particularly of Capitalistic Enterprise."
Instead of selecting our illustration from economic topics which are extremely fractional, as it would be easy to do, we prefer to take specimens of a sort more representative of recent tendencies. In the above titles we have references to economic phenomena of highly developed arid complex tjrpes. Correla-
"* Third edition, Leipzig, 1900.
1
20 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
tion of most intricate nature is implied in all such analyses. Can there be room in the premises for any scientific interest distinct from and in additicKi to the economic interest? The answer depends entirely upon the extension which the econo- mists claim or allow for their interest. As in the case of the historians, the subject-matter may be so defined as to merge the economic interest at last completely with that of the sociologist." On the other hand, the economic interest may be so circumscribed that attention is restricted to an economic mechanism merely as such, an endless chain composed of the main links: capital, labor, production, consumption. In pro-: portion as this latter is the case, the economic activities of life are wrested by an intellectual tour de force from the real social process, and are looked upon as an entity sufficient unto itself. From the sociological view-point, economic activities are merely a division of the manifestations of the human process as a whole. That process begins with the power of individuals to feel wants, and to act in response to the stimulus of wants. It continues through limitless cycles of differentia- tion of wants, of individual types characterized by variations of wants, of groupings of individuals incidental to effort to satisfy the wants, and of institutions and other achievements deposited in the course of this incessant endeavor.
To the sociologist, every type of individual, every combina- tion of activities, every institution, whether eccmomic, political, artistic, scientific, or religious, is of interest, not for its separate
^^For a striking illustration of the tendency among recent economists to see these things essentially as the sociologists see them, vide Sombart, Der modeme Kapitalistnus, Vol. I, Introduction, pp. xxv fi. Professor Sombart is not directly discussing the relationship which we have in mind. His argument virtually amounts to a special application of the general principle which we are formulating, i. e., to know any economic relationship fully, its connections have to be traced with the whole process of human activities. Thus : ** Was namlich von dem Wirtschaftstheoretiker der Zukunft verlangt werden wird, sind wieder lange Gedatikenreihen, die heute ganz aus der Mode gekommen zu sein scheinen. Der Theoretiker von heute bastelt fast immer ein beobachtetes Phanomen an die nachstliegende Ursache an, wenn er es nicht vorzieht, durch Messung an einem bereftgehaltenen (meist ethischen) Massstabe seiner Herr zu werden, etc, etc."
THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF SOCIOLOGY 21
self, but so far as it can shed or reflect light about the articula- tions and the motivations of the process as a whole, in which each detail in its own degree is an incident. Without involving ourselves in a boundary dispute with the psychologists, we may repeat that the sociological interest begins with individuals feeling wants. How do those wants bring them into contact with other individuals feeling wants ? How do the individuals thus in ccMitact modify each other's wants ? How do the wants of the separate individuals become a species of environment, conditioning all the individuals? How does the reaction between the elements — i. e., individuals, physical environment, and social environment — become complex, and ever more complex, in the progressively varying reaction of cause and effect within the combination ? How do types of want, and of individual and social contact, and of environment, result from the different stages of this process ? What significance, at any stage of the process, have details, or groups of details, or sys- tems of details, as means of interpreting the process?
Thus, from the sociological point of view, either a group of economic facts, or the economic system of an age or a civiliza- tion, or the economic theory of a culture epoch, is each in its way merely a term in the whole proposition which sociology is trying to formulate. The human interest is in knowing the human whole. The sociologists have broken into the goodly fellowship of the social scientists, and have thus far found themselves frankly unwelcome guests. They have a mission, however, which will not always be unrecognized. Their part in the whole work of knowing the human reality is, in the first place, to counteract the tendency of specialists to follow centrif- ugal impulses. The tendency has already gone so far that social science is apparently split into fragments which cannot be reorganized into a unified body of knowledge. Sociology stands first for the co-ordinating stage in the knowing process. Recognition of its legitimacy and its necessity is merely a ques- tion of time. We have specified some of the grounds for this
22 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
belief, in an editorial reviewing the course of thought about sociology during the past decade.^'
To recapitulate : The sociologists are attempting to show that salvation of the social sciences from sterility must be worked out, not by microscopic description and analysis of details alone, but by such correlation and generalization of par- ticulars that the whole social process will be intelligible. The limits of this chapter restrict discussion to that phase of socio- logical theory in which intellectual apprehension is uppermost. From the human standpoint no science is an end in itself. The proximate end of all science is organizaticm into action. The ultimate interest of the sociologists, therefore, is in turning knowledge of the social process into more intelligent promo- tion of the process. This outcome of sociological theory is more fully indicated in Parts VIII and IX.
^American Journal of Sociology, Vol. XI, p. i.
CHAPTER II
DEFINITIONS OF SOCIOLOGY
Having indicated in chap, i the view of sociology which this syllabus represents, we now retrace our steps, and in the remaining chapters of Part I we shall call attention to some of the gradations through which approach has been made to the present sociological outlook. G>mment upon alternative definitions of sociology will throw light upon the steps already taken toward final survey of the field to be explored.' From possible definitions we select the following :
1. Sociology is the science of society, or the science of social phenomena.^
2. Sociology is the study of men considered as affecting and as affected by association,^
3. Sociology is a unified view of human life, derived (a) from analysis of all discoverable phases of human activity, past and present; (b) from synthesis of these activities in accord- once with their functional meanings; (c) from telic interpretor tion of the whole thus brought to view, in so far as tendencies are indicated in the process analyzed; and it is finally a body of guiding principles, derived from this analysis, for the conduct of life.
Each of these definitions or descriptions of sociology is consistent with the others, and each may be used to complete or to recapitulate the others.*
Definition i is the most compact statement which can be made of the whole subject-matter which sociology finds it necessary to treat.
^Ward, Popular Science Monthly, June, 190 J, fi. 1x3.
' Small, American Journal of Sociology, Jantiary, X900, p. 506.
' For a large number of definitions of sociology which we need not notice, vide Ward, " Contemporary Sociology." American Journal of Sociology, Janu- ary, BCarch, and May, 190J.
23
24 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
Definition 2 states the same thing in terms of the units which have to be recognized in all our treatment of this subject- matter.
Definition 3 puts the emphasis on the great divisions of the content of the science, after it has employed its methods upon the subject-matter.^
The foregoing may serve at once as samples of the thousand and one definitions of sociology, and as approaches to a work- ing definition. Whatever their variations, whatever their merits and demerits, they all indicate at last more or less definite purpose to reach the same result.
In presence of the same body of facts about human experi- ence, intellectual interest in organizing and interpreting the facts concentrates in several distinct ways. For instance, one variety of thinkers look out over human associations, and they are moved to ask : " How did men come to associate as they do now ? *' This is the typical question of those whose primary curiosity is about the genetic aspect of human experience. Thinkers of another variety survey the same facts, and they ask: "How do men manage to preserve the stattis quo?" Tliis question voices the peculiar interest of the men who care more for insight into the present social situation, for analysis of present social arrangements and the way they work, than for knowledge of how they came into existence. A third variety of thinkers are relatively indifferent to both these questions, and they ask rather : " What are the visible indications about the ways in which men will associate in the future ? " This is the question that rallies the men who are trying to make the things which are seen disclose those that are unseen. It is the question of the seer, the idealist, the constructive philosopher.
*"Was der Mensch ist, verdankt er der Vereinigung von Mensch und Mensch. Die Mdglichkeit, Associationen hervorzubringen, die nicht nur die Kraft der gleichzeitig Lebenden erhohen, sondem vor Allem durch ihren die Personlichkeit des Einzelnen tiberdauemden Bestand die Tergangenen Ge- schlechter mit den Kommenden verbinden, gab una die Moglichkeit der Entwicklung, der Geschichte." — Gierke, Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, Vol I, p. I.
\
DEFINITIONS OF SOCIOLOGY 25
To him past and present are nothing except as they contain and reveal the future. Still another variety of men take for granted all the answers to these questions that seem to them worth con- sidering, and their question is : " What is the thing to do here and now, in order to make the better future that is to be?" This is the query o£ the men who want to be more than mere scholars. They want to accomplish something. They want to organize rational movements for making life yield increasing proportions of its possibilities.
The fact that these lines of cleavage exist between men who deal with sociology, calls for attention to several things that have caused much confusion. In the first place, men of these different varieties have expressed or implied definitions of the scope of sociology which perhaps seem irreconcilable. The truth is that they have merely emphasized, and in some cases overemphasized, the particular phase of the vast reaches of sociology which is peculiarly interesting to themselves. They have very naturally placed special stress upon their own division of labor^ and they have incidentally slurred over the other divisions of labor. It by no means follows that these men would explicitly eliminate or disparage these other portions of science, nor that the final answer to the different types of ques- tion will contain anything irreconcilable. The fact, however, that men have actually pursued these different inquiries under the name of sociology, accounts for the wide divergencies between treatises and monographs that have used this title. In one case we find plain anthropology or ethnology ; in another, simply old-fashioned philosophy of history, with little except its arrogation of a new name to redeem it f rcxn the condemna- tion under which the older thinking rests; in other cases we have had political or economic or ethical philosophy ; and again we have had the same rule-of -thumb policy that experimenters have time out of mind adventured, sometimes to worse than no purpose, and sometimes with fortunate results.
Now, the truth is that human experience has aspects and implications that are at one and the same time genetic ajid
a6 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
static and teleologic and technologic^ Probably very few sociologists, however special the studies which have given them most prominence, have entirely neglected the other aspects of social reality. At all events, sociology will be an abortion until it is a successful integration of the genetic and static and teleologic and technologic elements involved in the social process, and consequently in sociological theory. It is by no means desirable that division of labor within the sociological field should cease. On the contrary, our problems are demand- ing further differentiation without visible limit. The desirable thing is that the workers of the types just mentioned shall keep within sight of each other, shall remember that they are parts of each other, and shall acquire more facility in correcting themselves by each other.
We may say of the innumerable definitions or descriptions of sociology, of which we have cited samples, that each repre- sents the opinion of a person or of a school, in opposition to some other view of what sociology is or ought to be. Each definition represents the best that s(Mneone has done in his effort after a clear and whole view of all that is necessarily involved. No definition has yet won the assent of all the sociologists, and it is not certain that all of them whose opinions have weight can agree in the near future upon the same provi- sional definition. One fact nevertheless crops out in the writings of all the sociologists, namely : they are all trying to reach judg- ments of a higher degree of generality than the subject-matter of any single branch of social science is competent to authorize. It makes no difference how narrowly a given sociologist defines his discipline for himself ; he sooner or later begins to betray his tacit conception of his mission by propounding judgments that leap over his own boundary. Their validity depends upon knowledge that belongs, in the first place, to each of the more special divisions of social science. It follows that, in spite of all disagreements about territory, sociology is in practice, as a
•This proposition will be expanded in Parts II, III, IV, V, VII, VIII, and IX.
*
DEFINITIONS OF SOCIOLOGY 27
matter of fact, an attempt to organize and generalize all avail- able knowledge about the influences that pervade human asso- ciations. The men who make the most restricted definitions of sociology often indulge in the most absolute generalizations in the name of sociology, and they seem to take themselves quite seriously while they are thus placing the eccentricity of their logic upon exhibition.
The impulse to generalize social laws of higher orders than those to be derived from the traditional social sciences may be audacious. It may look to results which are beyond the reach of human reason. The ambition to develop a system of generalizations which will interpret the influences that mold human destinies may be foredoomed to disappointment. The fact remains that the sociologists are in the midst of an adven- ture which means nothing less than going to the limits of our mental powers^ in attempt to trace the workings of human association in all times and under all circumstances. As was said above, this turns out to be true about equally, though in different ways, of those who seek wisdom through a sociology defined as the science of an abstracted section of social facts, and of those who boldly describe sociology as a comprehensive science or philosophy.
In a word, our intellectual limits confine u^ as a rule, to particular examination of some fraction of the conditions of life, upcMi which our attention has been fastened; but we all alike tend to make that special fraction of life a key to life in general. We want to see life as it is, and to see it whole. This is what is expressed in the first definition.
We find, however, after preliminary surveys of life as a whole, that all its visible external phases are made up of some sort of reactions, physical or spiritual, between persons. We sum this up in the general term " association." To under- stand life, past or present, we have to be clear in our per- ception that it is, from beginning to end and through and through, an affair of association between person and person. After we discount the purely vegetative factor in life, our
a8 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
drawing sustenance from the soil^ and our dependence upon climate, all of which we share in common with the plants, all the external stimuli which affect us are occurrences in associa- tion with other people. We make associations, and associa- tions make us; and these reciprocal acticHis are all there is to life on its outward* side.
This is what is expressed by the second formula. All society is association, and all association is society. To get a scientific view of society, therefore, we have to resolve it into details of association between persons, and to find out the different sorts of things that are involved in human association.
It may be worth while at this point to give further positive expression of our assumption that this sort of knowledge is worth getting. Many people deny the value of all generalized knowledge. They believe in the arts, but they do not believe in the sciences. If we were to argue the question of the value of sociology, the course of reasoning would be precisely parallel with that which is necessary in order to support the claims of any science, in contrast with hand-to-hand knowledge of scxne of the details with which the science deals. Is it good to know how to dress wounds ? Then it is good to know anatomy and physiology. Is it good to know how to reduce crude ore to iron bars? Then it is good to know physics and chemistry, and their application in metallurgy. Is it good to know how to raise wheat, or make cloth, and find a market for it ? Then it is good to know agricultural chemistry and political economy. Is it good to know how to draw a contract, or to transfer a title ? Then it is good to know legal and pditical science. Is it good to know how to teach a boy or girl the three R's ? Then it is good to know psychology and pedagogy. Is it good to try to live our own personal lives as wisely and well as possible? Then, by the same tc4cen, it is good to know sociology.
As has been pointed out in the previous chapter, and as this syllabus will assume throughout, for many years to come there will be a demand for a few professional sociologists; but the great value of sociology to most people will be an indirect
DEHNITIONS OF SOCIOLOGY 29
consequence of its furnishing a point of view, a perspective, an atmosphere, which will help to place all the problems of life with which each has to deal ; or, to use a different figure, it will serve as a pass-key to all the theoretical difficulties about society that each of us may encounter.
The meaning will be plainer after this argument is finished than it can be at once ; but we may say in general that there is a close analogy between the service which physical science has rendered to everybody — those who know some of it, and those who know none of it, alike — and the service which sociology is destined to render. In the case of physical science, the service is this : not one person in ten thousand can state a single law of nature ; only rare persons can formulate exactly the general law of gravitation, not to mention the specific Newtonian theorems of motion. Such phrases as " the indestructibility of matter," " the equivalence of forces^" " chemical affinity," " evolution," and the like, are words only, if they are even as much as that, to most of the people of the civilized world; yet ignorant and learned alike show some of the effects of living in a time when these ideas are current. We do not talk very much in home, and shop, and school, and church about these scientific techni- calities, but we behave ourselves in the presence of physical facts in a way different from that in which people behaved before these scientific ways of looking at things were reached.
Early in the school life of the child the teacher begins to say things no longer in terms of facts — as, "The dog barks," "The boy runs" — but in the form of generalizations: "All dogs bark when they are hurt;" "When dogs are hurt and bark, they are apt to bite ; " " The boy who hurts the dog may need to run ; " and so on up to the widest inductions. Now, the point is that we have learned to think of the physical world as a place where cause and effect reign. We may be able to put into words not a single large operation of cause and effect ; but we are out of the realm of myth and miracle; we are in the realm of order, and regularity, and consistent sequence of antecedent and consequent. Whatever takes place is assumed
30 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
to have a rational reason, whether we have any clue to the reason or not. Whatever takes place today we believe will take place, under exactly the same circumstances, tomorrow, or the next day, or any day. That is, whether we know much physical science or little, we are all in a relatively scientific attitude toward physical facts, and new knowledge does not entail utter reconstruction of our plan of life.
Scientific knowledge of society is bound to do a similar thing for our attitude toward social facts. Before the French Revolution the average Frenchman held the government responsible for everything, from weather to war. The gov- ernment was, to all intents and purposes, just as mystical as Zeus was to the Greeks who heard Homer's songs, or as Walhalla was to the Norse braves. Today, to certain types of people, society is an arbitrary imposition upon the indi- vidual, while to other types of people the individual is an impudent pretender in the exclusive domain of society. That is, when people look out upon life, they still see men as trees walking. They do not see real men, but only. figures in a mirage, just as rain, and hail, and lightning, and thunder, and earthquake, and birth, and growth, and death were capricious actions of mysterious spirits before people got insight into the physical world.
Technical sociology will always be as rare as technical astronomy and geology and biology. Most of us will simply have the use of the general conceptions which it organizes. But, in either case, as people advance in knowledge and mental power, they get their ideas into more and more exact shape. We may teach a third-grade class without knowing much science of any sort. At that stage we need tact, and acquaint- ance with live children, rather than formal science; but the farther along the pupils are whcwn we have to teach — let our subject be mathematics, or literature, or history, or Latin, or whatever — the more we shall have to shape our utterances within the molds which scientific discoveries have fashioned. So it is with sociology. Whether we are talking about Cain
DEFINITIONS OF SOCIOLOGY 31
and Abel, and the causes of their family quarrel, or about President Mitchell and the coal barons measuring strength against each other, or Britannia ruling the waves, and all the other nations of the earth meditating what they are going to do about it, we are dealing with variations of rudimentary elements, operating in accordance with certain general laws, displaying quite as evident regularity and consistency as is the case with physical occurrences.
This syllabus will deal with some of these rudiments of every social situation. It will not lay down rules for securing human happiness, because such measure of happiness as is within our reach has to be won by practice of the arts of life, rather than by simply knowing the science of life. The argu- ment will attempt to show, however, what sort of general ccmceptions of social facts must be assimilated, in order to make us relatively as intelligent about the social conditions of life as we are about the physical conditions.
We may now return to the third definition of sociolc^ (p. 23).
This statement expresses what we find out after we have worked a while on the facts of life, along the lines indicated by formulas i and 2. That is, we find that ** social phe- nomena," or "society," when examined somewhat closely, all run into each other. They, or it, are really one phenomenon. What is taking place in Chicago today, in the way of buy- ing, and selling, and getting gain, of marr3nng and giving in marriage, of playing and learning and teaching, of worship- ing God and of shaming the devil, turns out to be part and parcel of the same thing which the earliest nature-men were doing when we find them on the frayed edges of traceable history. If there was "no new thing under the sun" at Solomon's time, neither has there ever been since. Stone age, iron age, steam age, electricity age, magic age, philosc^hy age, and science age ; the age of household religion, of tribal reli- gion, of national religion, of cosmic religion — all of these are parts of the present, and the present was laboring in them all.
32 GENERAL SOqOLOGY
We do not see the real fact in a simple familiar episode of today — like a teamsters' strike in the stock yards, or a merger of railroad systems — unless we see it as a transient phase of a permanent whole, which not only fills the present, but which shades off gradually into an invisible past, on the one hand, and into an impenetrable future, on the other. In a very real sense, the life which we live is one with all the life that has occupied the earth, or will occupy it hereafter.
The moment this fact becomes clear to us, if we have any degree of the genuine scientific spirit, we begin to be aware that the second and third specifications of the third formula are inevitable. To understand any sort of unity, we have to take it to pieces in thought, and then put it together again. We have to perform the process of analysis and S)mthesis. Now, this accounts for what has been going on in all the different ways of studying society ; and it accounts further for the fact that sociology is intimately allied with all the other social sciences. We need not turn aside to discuss the nature of this relation. Enough that people have felt the need of analyzing society from a hundred different points of view. It has proved, sooner or later, that each of these types of analysis has tended to organize itself into some sort of S)m- thesis with all the rest. Whether this is the case in every instance or not, the laws of the mind assert a demand for that sort of synthesis, and a hunger of mind remains wherever the demand is not satisfied. A unified view of a reality, which we have come to think of as a real unity, involves alternate analysis and synthesis of the reality, until nothing remains vague, and nothing seems to be unrelated to the rest.
We may be sure that our conception of life is essentially defective unless the most trifling sorts of occurrences have a place in our scheme of thinking. In this argument we are showing the use of some of the most necessary categories in which sociology arranges the chief types of social facts.
Then we reach clause (c) in the third formula. We dis- cover, in the course of sociological analysis, that all the moral
DEFINITIONS OF SOCIOLOGY 33
judgments which men have entertained at any time in the past have derived their force at last from beliefs which men have held about the effects of that conduct upon life as a whole. Some picture of life in the large has swayed before people's minds, and those things were supposed to be good which helped to fill out the scheme of life. Those things were bad which interfered with the dominant facts of the world.* The same is true today. Whatever our theological or philosophical beliefs, we are all substantially alike in holding that conduct to be moral which in the long run and on the whole works well. Moreover, we have no other appeal, when we are trying to decide what is most moral in a given case — for instance, our treatment of the Filipinos. We have no other test of what is moral than our best judgment of how different kinds of con- duct will work on the whole. That being so, ability to trace the effects of social causation, in past, present, and future, is of radical importance as a part of real knowledge of human soicety in general. We do not know anything until we know what it is for.
Suppose, for instance, that I am trying to describe a given object, but have no idea of the service it was designed to per- form, or that I carefully repress all references to its purpose. I distinguish certain upright columns and certain cross-bars; then a horizontal plane composed of leather or wood or cane ; then some connections with columns higher than the former, and some further cross-bars connecting the before-mentioned bars; but I do not describe anything. I simply make a cata- logue of some items which, so far as my description has gone, are only arbitrarily connected. But presently I get, or choose to divulge, the idea of a device for the support of the human body in a semi-recumbent position — a chair. Then I can give some sort of an account of the relation of these materials to the process that is to be performed ; and the thing begins to have reality.
Nothing is ever described properly unless it is described
* Vide chaps. 43-45.
34 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
with reference to the end which it is supposed to be fitted to serve or to the process in which it occurs. This is ccxispicu- 6usly the case with the fact of human association. Can we get such a view of association as a whole that we may see all around it, and along toward the outcome of it, and may thus describe the details and incidents of it in the light of its ulti- mate purpose? If the question means, ^'Can we find an absolute terminal for the social process, and can we describe association as a finished affair ? " the answer is emphatically no. If the question means^ " Can we discover a definite content of the social process, a work which it is always doing, and which, in the nature of the case, so far as we can see, it must always continue to do, so long as the process persists ? " the answer is emphatically yes. We must therefore reach some sort of a con- ception of what this vast unity that we call human society is for ; then we must be able to trace the effects which different kinds of action have in the line of prcxnOting or retarding this total purpose of society. We have in this knowledge a basis for practical morality.
This brings us to the last clause of our third formula. We shall say more about it under the next title. The final phase of sociology is " social technology," viz., principles of adapting means to ends in practical improvement of society.'' Just as the science of physics proves its right to exist by contributing to the various divisions of engineering, so the general science of sociology will prove its genuineness as knowledge in pn^r- tion as it can mold principles for the successful conduct of life. Sociology is not reformation of criminals, nor administration of charities, nor solution of the poverty problem, nor preven- tion of labor conflicts, nor reform of government, nor improve- ment of education, nor the making of religion practical. Yet sociology would be an abortion if it did not eventually promote each and all of these things. The matter may be left for the present in this somewhat paradoxical form. The emphasis at this point is on the fact that sociology is primarily knowledge,
' Cf. Part IX.
DEFINITIONS OF SOCIOLOGY 35
not action. It is detailed knowledge, analytical knowledge;
* it is all-around^ inclusive, synthetic knowledge of the whole
social reality.
Comte said : " See in order to foresee ; " " Know in order to foreknow." This is what all the definitions of sociology try to provide for. The thought is not to frame a science that ends with knowing; for no knowledge is complete until it passes into action. The aim is science that will pass naturally into doing. In order to have such science, the basis must be laid in knowledge which is as general, and abstract, and objective, and disinterested as though mere statement of truth were the final thing to be desired.
f After this prolonged discussion, an entirely different
description or definition of sociology may be timely. For cer- tain purposes it is an advance on the others, viz. :
4. Sociology is an attempt so to visualise and so to inter- pret the whole of human experience that it wUl reveal the last discoverable grounds upon which to base conclusions about the rational conduct of life.
It is unnecessary to comment on definition 4. We may simply repeat that all these definitions are results of attempts to formulate the same thing.^
A still more accurate description of sociology has been implied in chap. i. It is the main thesis of this syllabus, and the body of the argument is in suf^rt of it. We simply record it here as more accurate and inclusive than any other single formula, viz. :
5. Sociology is the science of the social process.
'This fact has been discussed at length under the title, "What is a Sociologist? " American Journal of Sociology, January, 1903.
i
CHAPTER III
THE IMPULSE OF SOCIOLOGY
Suggestions contained in chap. 2 have made long discus- sion of the present subject unnecessary. We may merely answer, in brief, the question : How did it come about that sociology is in the world at all ?
This is something more than a mere matter of historical curiosity. The answer to the question goes far toward explain- ing very prevalent confusions about sociology itself. The subject sometimes seems to be utterly abstract speculative philosophy. As it is represented by other men, it knows nothing whatever of logic or philosophy, and is simply a scheme of sentimentally benevolent experiment. How does it come about that such different things can pass under the same name ? ^
The answer is, in a word, that in all probability the senti- mental philanthropic impulse has done more than the scientific impulse to bring sociology into existence. Men of the type of St. Simon (1760-1825), Fourier (1772-1837), and even Comte (1798- 1 851), in France; Robert Owen, Ruskin, Maurice, Kingsley, Robertson, and Mill, in England; the socialists in all countries ; a group of earnest so-called ** social- scientists," and especially certain types of philanthropists, in this country, so industriously advocated the improvement of social conditions that presently attempts to develop a scientific sociology became inevitable. The various agitations for social reform or improvement worked in this way: People of philanthropic temper decided that something was wrong and ought to be righted. It might be the existence of paupers ; or of competent workmen out of work, or of long hours, low pay, and bad sanitary conditions for those who did work; or of private ownership of what might have been owned by the
36
THE IMPULSE OF SOCIOLOGY 37
public; or a hundred other things. Earnest people declared that these things ought not so to be. Then obstinate con- servatives were roused to opposition. They said: "Non- sense! These people are crazy. Sentimentalism has gone mad in them. They mean well, but they are trying to do the impossible. It is paternalism. It is contrary to the laws of political economy to attempt to help people who do not help themselves. There is no scientific ground for these visionaries to stand on." There was some truth on both sides. Evils were being allowed to take their course which the proper amotmt of attention could have mitigated, if not wholly remedied. On the other hand, schemes of reform were being promoted without serious attempt to find out what their con- sequences would be, outside of a very narrow circle. As Herbert Spencer has shown, in his essay on The Sins of Legis- lators, laws were passed, in the most confident spirit, which time and again produced greater evils than they were devised to remove. All this tended to educate people of a different type ; people who could see the evils, on the one hand, but, on the other hand, could see that our knowledge of social rela- tions is too meager to be a safe guide in attempts to reorganize society. These men said : " Yes, the sentimentalists are right that we ought to do better, but the conservatives are also right that we ought to look before we leap. We must be sure we are right before we go ahead ; or, at least, if we cannot be sure, we must study society deeply enough to justify our beliefs that courses of action are reasonable, and in the direction of progress." *
It followed that a few people accepted the logic of the situation and marked out a course of study accordingly. Lester F. Ward, the author of Dynamic Sociology, is the best illus- tration. His position was, in brief, that men majr» make human life vastly more rational, profitable, worthy, and satis- fying, if they will train the same sort of study upcm life as a whole which they now devote to more or less meaningless
^ ride Spencer, The Study of Sociology,
^ GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
abstractions from life. The shortest and surest route to better doing in the end is more thorough knowing. There is work for a few students who will devote themselves to patient study of human society as a whole^ without impatience about the length of time which will be required to reach practical results. There is work for men who will consent to be sneered at as dreamers, who will be patient while people revile and ridicule them as impractical transcendental philosophers. There is work for men who will run large surveys of life in its ultimate meanings, and will discover general principles that are always valid in society. This will in the end prove the most practical sort of work^ for it will furnish the only possible rational basis for intelligent programs of social action. Meanwhile nobody is fit for this grade of work who cannot devote himself to it with patience and persistence, in spite of probability that during his lifetime it will yield very meager returns which can be put to any practical use.
Essentially, search for fundamental or general social prin- ciples is the most practical sort of social work that can be undertaken. Superficially, immediately, and to the person capable of appreciating only concrete details, it is bound to seem a sterility and a mockery. Yet sociology has come into being from this deep loyal impulse of sqpial service. Its whole animus is constructive, remedial, ameliorative. Even its most abstract and technical refinements have their final meaning as ultimate contributions to the art of life. Of course, it is true in sociology, as everywhere else in the scientific world, that men get swamped in technicalities and forget the larger inter- ests which alone make the technicalities worth while. In spite of these individual lapses, sociology is through and through a plan to lay the necessary foundaticms of knowledge for the most enlightened program of human life which it is possible for men to propose. It is not dead embalmed ^ience. It is an attempt to reach vital insight for the sake of efficient action. It is at the same time a consistent protest against
THE IMPULSE OF SOaOLOGY 39
actic»i, or agitations for action, in advance of ability to furnish morally conclusive reasons fcH* the action.
After what has been said^ it is to be hoped that two things have been made clear : First : The program of sociology aims finally at the most thorough, intense, persistent, and system- atic effort to make human life all that it is capable of becoming. Second: This thoroughly social and constructive impulse is held in restraint by scientific sociology until a philosophy and a theory of action can be justified. There is nothing in soci- ology, therefore, for pec^le who are not able and willing to consider today's practical affairs in their relation to the largest generalizations of human conditions and actions that the mind can reach. The impulse is humanitarian. The method is that of completely objective science and i^ilosophy. ^
CHAPTER IV
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY
GiDDiNGS, "Modern Sociology/' International Monthly, November, 1900.
Ward, "Contemporary Sociology," American Journal of Sociology, January, March, and May, 1902.
Vincent, " History of Sociology," ibid., September, 1904.
Professor Vincent begins his courses on the history of sociology with Plato, and he finds some contributions to the subject in every subsequent period of progress in thought. That is, men have puzzled their brains about general social truths ever since Plato, and probably long before. There is essential likeness, in impulse at any rate, between all these efforts to know ourselves and our life-conditions. In that sense it is true that sociology is as pld as human reflection.
Then there is a more special sense in which a closer approach to modem sociology is reached, beginning with Montesquieu (1689-1755)- His two works, The Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans (1734) and The Spirit of the Laws (1748), are often called the beginning of the philosophy of history. Now, sociology is a radically different affair from the philosophy of history, as we find it in the abundant litera- ture of that subject, from Montesquieu to Marx, or from Bossuet to Buckle, or from Herder to H^el or Lotze. At the same time the philosophers of history were groping toward the very thing that the sociologists are attempting, although their methods were very different. They wanted to discover the general principles which human experience shows to be the laws to which human life must conform. The common fault of the philosophers of history was the inordinately large ratio of their speculative philosophy to their positive history. They reasoned before the facts, and without the facts, and tiius fabricated an artificial world, instead of interpreting the real
40
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY 41
world. Yet the development of the philosophy of history was pioneer work for sociology, and we may also say for history. It got a series of untenable hypotheses out of the way. It helped push real social problems out** into clear lig^t. It cannot be urged too strongly, therefore, that for practical sociology patient study of the history of the subject, including the many schemes of the philosophy of history, is thoroughly worth while. Indeed, it will often happen that the reality of the fundamental social problems will not be visible until one has gradually approached them along the path which these specu- lative systems ^followed in finding at last the terra firma of social reality. To see that there are actual problems to be solved, we sometimes have to adjust our vision to vague con- ceptions of social facts as they appeared in the panorama which one philosopher of history after another imagined, and which one sociologist after another drew in more literal perspective.
Assuming acquaintance with the outlines ^ cited at the beginning of this chapter, our contribution to the subject will be a version of the same facts from a point of approach slightly different from that of either of these sketches. The sociologists have exhibited progress in the development of methodology. This progress has both directly and indirectly promoted advance toward definite conceptions of problems which are awaiting use of adequate methods. In a word, the present problems of sociology are necessary sequences of increas- ing precision in presenting the exact questions which arise in the course of passing from the known to the unknown. This is the case with sociology just as with physics or chemistry. In arranging our knowledge of social facts, we constantly run against our limitations, and we forthwith attempt to break down the barriers and arrive at more general knowledge. The most convenient illustration is that of the economic man who served the science of political economy so faithfully for a century. People tried to exhaust knowledge of the " economic man." What does the " economic man " do under all circum-
42 GENERAL SOOOLOGY
Stances? But tfacy found at last that the ''coooomic man*' sometimes becomes a bar to knowledge. He gets himself installed in the place of the real man. BefcMie we know it we are assuming that the only man there is,* is the '^econcMnic man/' while in fad " the economic man " never is. We take it for granted that what the economic interests in men tend to do, the actual man really does. Then this turns out to be wide of the maiic, and we are driven to the necessity of sedcing more general knowledge of man than that which is summed up in the economic man. We have to find out, not what the economic man does in hypothetical circumstances, but what the real man does in actual circumstances. That involves much more general knowledge of man than traditional eco- nomic science supposed to be necessary. The history of soci- ology consequently covers a development of thought about society, from the most rudimentary reflections about man and his lot, through the profoundest metaphysical qieculations about human origins and destinies, to the present prevailing attempts to analyze all classes of human activities, and to explain them as terms in a practically endless series of physi- cal and psychical causation. The history is thus, in a word, the history of the growth of the mind*s power to penetrate the complexity of human events.
To get our bearings, therefore, in today's socic^ogy, it is necessary to survey the course of thought by which we have arrived at our present attitude toward the problems of society. We must review the forms under which the pioneers in soci- ology have presented the problems to themselves. These early attempts are instructive, not because they have OMitributed directly to the solution of sociological or social problems, but because they have led to more exact statement of the problems.
Judged by results^ sociology up to date has comparatively little to say for itself. Possibly the chief significance of the sociologists is in their instinct of the oneness of all knowledge about men. If names were consistently used, sociology would
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY 43
not be understood to mean a fragment of social science. It * would be the comprehensive term for all search into the facts
of human association, somewhat as biology no longer means any special phase of the science of life, but the whole body of investigation into vegetable and animal phenomena. We are obliged to use the terra "sociology," however, to designate that standpoint from which a better survey of human associa- tion is becoming possible. At present this standpoint seems, to those social scientists who do not occupy it, entirely isolated from their interests^
The best that has been done so far by sociology in the current technical sense, except incidentally in certain of its con- % Crete divisions, is to demonstrate the lack of method in
analyzing social relationships, and in searching for the secrets of social cause and effect. The history of sociology is a record of an apparently aimless hunt for something which the hunters did not know how to describe or define. In the last half- century a few students of society have been filled with vague discontent because of haunting dissatisfaction with the sort of insight into social truth which the traditional studies fur- nished. These students have beaten the air, sometimes only to raise more dust, but sometimes also with the result of chasing away some of the lingering clouds.
On the whole, the history of sociology consists mainly of attempts to plan a kind of study which will jrield more intimate knowledge of society than the traditional social sciences have reached. As yet there is very little to show by way of con- clusion from these quests. The fortunes of the attempts are nevertheless a precious legacy to the present generation. They are, first of all, object-lessons in how not to do it. In the second place, they are indirect and fragmentary indications of how to state the problems of society and how to proceed in solving them. The history of sociological method is thus useful training for research, if we are wise enough to gather up its teachings.
In accordance with the foregoing, we may join with Tarde
i
44 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
in finding the progenitors of our sociologists long before the name was invented. Tarde implies belief that the old philoso- phers and theologians were actually the pioneers in the fields of study which have at last reached such intensive cultivation that the class of investigators known as sociolc^sts had to be differ- entiated.^ He speaks of the " change promising better results " which is observable from the time when '' such specialists in sociology '* as the philologists, the philosophers of religion, and especially the economists began to perform the more modest task of identifying minute facts and of formulating their laws.'
There has been a gradual recognition of interlacings among human relationships, and this perception has been calling for larger co-ordinations of research, and closer organization of results, than older students of society felt to be necessary. We have consequently arrived at conceptions of the relations of knowledge about society which constitute a totally new setting for all particular facts. This anticipated organon of knowledge about society is sociology. In order to get the most intimate view of sociology, both as it is and as it must be, we shall make a rapid survey of certain typical attempts to formulate socio- logical problems and methods. We may do this most con- veniently for our present purpose by reference to Earth's Die Philosophic der Geschichte als Sociologies
Earth's thesis is that there is no sociology except the phi- losophy of history. The theorem is not true, but it contains truth. The philosophy of history attempted to formulate the laws of social sequences. Sociology almost universally attempts to formulate, not merely laws of sequence, but also laws of past and present correlation. Many sociologists declare that the most important division of sociology is beyond both these
^Les lots sociales, p. 26.
' Symptomatic of changes taking place in views of the correlations of prob- lems is the phrase of Steinmetz : " L'^onomie politique, la branche [jtc] la plus avancte et la plus ind6pendante de la sociologie" (Durkheim, L'annie sociologiqu€, 1900, p. 47).
'Vol. I (Leipzig, 1897). Cf. review, American Journal of Sociology, March, 1898.
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY 45
groups, in laws of social aims and of the available means of attaining them.^ Even if we were reduced to a conception of sociology which identifies its subject-matter with that of the philosc^hy of history, it would be easy to show that sociology is perfecting a method which distinguishes it from traditional philosophy of history somewhat as astronomy from astrology, or chemistry from alchemy. This is by no means to deny essentia] similarity of purpose, to a certain extent at least, between the earlier and the later attempts to discover social laws. ''Sociology is accordingly the natural successor, heir, and assign of the worthy but ineffective philosophy of his- tory." ^ The ftmdamental difference between the philosophers of history and the sociologists is that the former hoped to explain human experience by means of logical deductions from speculative premises. The latter know that human experience is to be understood only by inductive investigation of an evolu- tionary process.
It is needless to ask how early men directed their attention to the actions of men, and tried to see those actions in their connections with each other, and then tried to recount the facts in their supposed relations.^ There came a time, at all events — let us say, for convenience, with Herodotus and Thucydides — when this attention to actions of men in the large was con- scious and deliberate. It had taken the place and rank of a dignified intellectual pursuit. It called itself history. It undertook to tell both what men had done and why they had done it. This, in general, is precisely what sociology tries to
* " Die Socialwittenachaf t hat xwei Aufgaben — Erkenntniss des Setenden mid Erkenntniss des Seinsollenden ; jener dient die theoretische, dieser die invctisclie Sociallehre" (Dietzel, Theoretisckt Socialokonomik, p. 4). Dietzel obviously means by the term Socialwissenschaft vtry nearly what we shall indicate as the proper connotation of the term " sociology."
" Die Aufgabe der practischen Sociallehre ist also eine dreifache : normative, kritische, techxiische; die der practischen Naturlehre nur eine einfache: technische" {idem, p. $)•
* Journal of PoHtical Economy, March, 1895, p. 173.
*0n the early history of social ideas, vide Rummler, Prolegomena eum Piafons Stoat (Basel, xSgx).
Â¥
46 GENERAL SOaOLOGY
do today. History is, therefore, sociology in the yolk. We shall understand sociology best not by dogmatizing about the sort of thing which it would please us to designate by that name. The name has come to stand for something which is asserting itself, whether we like it or not, and history, whether the historians like it or not, will remain a collection of litter, more or less artistically arranged, until it is generalized as sociology.
We shall form a more intelligent view of sociology if we follow the trunk line of its evolution from men's earliest naive attempts to see human actions together. This is what history has been from the beginning. It is what sociology is now. Sociology exists today because a few men have dis- covered that, if we are to see human actions in their most essential relations, a more complicated machinery of research and organization is necessary than historiography controls.
The disrepute into which the philosophy of history has fal- len is not due to disbelief that there has been method in human experience. When a modem critical historian speaks with con- tempt of the philosophy of history, he refers either to some of the obsolete methods of reaching historical judgments, or to some other man's philosophy of history. He is surely not con- temptuous himself, nor willing that others should be, toward his own philosophy of history. He always has one, if he is anything more than a rag-picker from the garbage-heaps of the past. But the more we study the philosophies of history that are no longer in vogue,^ the more are we impressed by a few commonplaces concerning them ; for instance :
First : People have attempted to make a very little knowl- edge go a long way in coining generalities about society. History has proved to be like the Bible : it may be made to teach anything, if we take it in sufficiently minute fragments.
Second : People have tried to create the general truths of history out of philosophical presuppositions, instead of build-
* Vide Flint, Philosophy of History, The first edition is more useful for a general survey than the incomplete second edition.
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY 47
. ing them up by collection and generalization of facts. That
is, they have trusted to dogmatism and deducticm instead of attemptinjg induction.
Third : People have had very crude conceptions of the ccwn- plexity of the things to which their assumed historical prin- ciples were supposed to apply. They have not been able to analyze the subject-matter so as really to see the elements involved.
Fourth : Hence the foregone conclusion of demand, sooner or later, for a method which shall be an improvement upon that of the philosophy of history.
At the same time, critical study of the philosophies of his- * tory is a most valuable propedeutic for sociology. Every
sociological system that is trying to push itself into favor today has its prototype among these more archaic systems, and not a few recent sociological schemes may be disposed of by the same process that rules these philosophies of history out of court.
^ On the other hand, each of these abortive philosophies of history has contributed its quota toward comprehension of the conditions of social problems, and together they have indirectly promoted the adoptiofi of adequate sociological methods. This fact may be indicated more in detail if we adopt for illustration Earth's seven-fold division of the philosophy of history, instead of discussing a score or more of familiar theorems of alleged central principles in history. We find that each of these views attempted to bring into focus something that is actually present in human affairs. It may not be the something alleged. It surely is not present in the proportions alleged. It is a real something, however, and the final science of society must know it and place it.
For instance, Barth distinguishes first The Individualistic View of History, There are still historians who hold that the actions of great individuals are the only proper content of history. There is no universal or general current which, from the beginning of society, carries the hero along with the rest of I mankind. On the contrary, according to this view, each hero
48 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
digs the course of his own current. This may have relations with the similar life-courses of other great men, but it by no means forms part of a great common current. The individual- ists think of the great personalities as free, as creators out of nothing, as first links of a new chain of events, which are so independent of the past that they are capable of beginning a new life in opposition to the endeavors of the past.
It is evident that so far ajs this view prevails there is no possibility of science. Science is knowledge of things in their correlation. If they have no correlation, there is no material for science. If there are no recurrences, no regularities, no uniformities in societary events, there is no possibility of the rudiments of all science. There can be no descriptive classifi- cation.
In order to appreciate the problem with which we are now dealing, it may be an advantage to state it in concrete form, thus : The things that we wa^it most to know about society are not things of the past, but of the present and the future. We turn back to the past because it is once for all before our eyes. It is a reality. We hope it will reveal some guidance for present and future. We want to know how men should act if they would make the most of life. We want to know what influences are at work, and how they work, in affecting social conditions. To that end we inquire into great historical move- ments, for example the transfer of power in the Italian penin- sula from the old Roman element to the barbarian element. We call it the fall of Rome. We name other similar move- ments: the breaking up of the Carolingian monarchy into European feudalism; or the consolidation of feudalism into the new monarchies ; or the overthrow of the aristocracies and the enfranchisement of the democracies in the early part of the nineteenth century. From such great movements we ought to learn something about what would be involved in a social change of equal magnitude today ; as, for instance, a solution of the labor problem which would give wage-earners a more direct and decisive influence in the economic order.
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY 49
Suppose we are asking how such a change in modern industrial society is to be brought about, and we go to history for the answer. We find a class of interpreters of history ring- ing the changes on this one theme, namely: "Great social changes are the product of individual factors alone." Now this answer is not as simple as it sounds. One man means by it that a few great, perhaps almost superhuman, men — Solon, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Bismarck — have been the main- springs of social movement, and the rest of the human herd have been inert masses moved by them. Others mean that social movements are simply the sk)w accretions of volume or force by addition of one human individual to another — the drop added to drop that wears the rock away, or the atom added to atom in one scale which at last overbalances the huge mass in the opposite scale. The individualistic view would say to the wage-earners of our present generation who want their class to become the dominant type in the state : " To bring about the industrial revolution that you want, either ' labor ' must incar- nate itself in a giant or hero, who will perform some modem labors of Hercules and make the world over; or the mere multiplication of the numbers of the wage-earners, regardless of combinations or changes of their ideas, or the co-operation of other classes, or the limitations of the constructive capacity of the operative class, will in time effect the desired social transformation, or it is impossible altogether."
This view of social forces makes individuals alone — whether the few great and forceful ones or the multitude of average ones — the sole factors in social complications.
Now, there is a sense in which this must be true. Society is made up of individuals, just as matter is supposed to be made up of atoms ; but no theory of atoms alone will account beforehand for the behavior of the particular atoms that make hydrogen or oxygen or sulphur or phosphorus. Nor will any theory of the atom alone account for what happens when one pair of substances enter into a reaction, and the unlike results when another pair of substances react upon each other. The
so GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
case is similar with the actions of individuals. All social facts are combinations of individual facts. Yet the influences at work in these combinations are not accounted for by any a priori conception of individuals which we can reach. For instance, a hundred socialistic German students are mustered into the imperial army and are sworn to defend the Kaiser and the flag. So long as they wear the uniform they are imperialists, not socialists. Now, there is something besides the sum of those individualities which is at work in giving them a character, when they are combined, that is different from the sum of their characters as isolated individuals. In this case the flag and the uniform may symbolize the' added something. At all events, it would be a very shallow and unpenetrating account that would find in the company merely one hundred detached and self -sufficient individuals.
It may be said that the individualistic view of history marks a sort of extreme swing of the pendulum from the fatalistic, mass notion of human affairs that prevailed before men were conscious of their own personal agency, before they had fairly differentiated themselv^ from their surroundings. It may be said that the task of finding out the facts about influences in society is virtually the task of finding the qual- ifications which must be thought of when we regard human fortunes as events of which individuals are the elements. It may be said that the individualistic view gives us a primary term in the social equation, and that our further work is to find out the value of the other terms which affect the value of the individual term. These propositions are no doubt approxi- mately correct. The ' individualistic conception of human affairs is not utterly false. It is a rough, tmcritical, inexact exaggeration of a perception which must be reduced to more precise and proportionate formulation.
In this play between unscientific, uncritical, wholesale assumptions about society, students have been brought to face a specific problem, namely : Given individual elements in society, given also a certain coherence of society, by virtue of
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY 51
which influences stronger than those of any individual persist, or at least influences persist with more than the personal energy of any individual, what are the specific modifjring and differ- entiating factors which procure social motion, progress, devel(^ment? Accordingly the historians, independent of the sociologists, have struck out in a new direction in the past half-century. The older historians told of the fortunes of per- sons, of states^ of humanity. The newer history, however, becomes more specific and realistic. Both in theory and in practice it considers nations as the vehicles of culture. It traces the development of their internal conditions. It com- pares them with each other. It tries to fix upon what is typical in each, and by that course to arrive at the history of humanity.
Even in conservative Germany, perceptions of scientific demands which have arisen in the course of arriving at such historical views have produced sociologists. They are not recc^ized in many of the universities, but they are working under various titles — philosc^hers, historians, economists, etc. They are searching for the most general truths about human associations, and about the forces that are working in them. In other words, the friction between the individualistic view of history and opposing views has been one of several distinct producers of inductive inquiry into real conditions. When the different inductive inquiries so provoked have become aware of each other, they have been seen to constitute a new line of approach to social reality, and they have together received the name "sociology."
A similar form of conclusion must follow due considera- tion of each attempt to account for the historical movements of society. Earth's second title is The Anthropo-Geographical View of History, Having shown in the foregoing paragraphs how a single one-sided view of past events has helped to form our methods of thinking, and to make scientific demands more precise and adequate, we need not consider other one-sided views at equal length. The outcome in each case is essentially the same. Each one-sided view has drawn attention to an
52 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
actual factor in the problem of society. The sociologists are now stating the problem in terms of all these factors so far discovered. The form of the sociological inquiry is not the old form of the historians: "Is the secret of human life this or that ? " The sociological form of inquiry is : " Given observed forms of influence in human affairs, how much of each detected form of influence is present in a given social movement, and in what measure does it work? " The several one-rsided views have thus been merged into a many-sided inquiry.®
We should notice, in passing, that a similar practical result is produced upon individuals by the study of the social sciences. Whether a given student gets a system of social doctrine satis- factory to himself or not, he emerges from the study of the social sciences, as at present organized, with a perception that the world of people is the arena of many interactive influences. In his judgments, either of past times or of current events, the student of the social sciences, from the sociological point of view, is forearmed against the narrowness that presupposes the prevalence of a single force rather than the interplay of many forces. The outlook that sociology makes familiar brings into the field of view the whole number of modifying influences that have been discovered amcmg men. The soci- ologist, studying the present condition of China, or Turkey, or Japan, or the Philippines, or Spain, or Germany, or France, or Russia, or the United States, does not imagine that he has before him a simple case of economics or politics or ethics. He sees the resultant of numerous physical and spiritual antece- dents, varied in each case by special combinations, and con- stituting in each case a peculiar organization of primary and secondary factors, the force of which has to be determined in each instance for itself.
Thus the development of thought about society has had the double result, on the one hand, of enlarging and clarifying
^Vide Chamberlin, "The Method of the Multiple Working Hypothesis/' Journal of Geology j November, 1897. This paper is a veritable sermon in stones, which the sociologists would do well to consider. Mutatis mutamiu, it may be taken bodily as a lesson in sociological methodology.
THE HISTORY OF SOQOLOGY 53
technical social science, and, on the other hand, of forming the molds in which practical judgments of the world's present social problems must be cast.
All the one-sided views of history are, in the first place, exaggerations of ideas which may be detected very early, at least in germs or suggestions. Barth observes that something of this anthropo-geographical conception of history is to be found in Hippocrates, Herodotus, Thucydides, etc. Coming to more recent times, the idea was so prominent in Herder that many readers have hastily reduced his theory of history to terms of this notion alone. Ritter, professor in the university and military school at Berlin (1779-1859), systematically expanded the idea. His geographical studies have become the basis for school work in the subject in Germany, and his influ- ence may be traced throughout the world. His ambition was to make geography an interpreter of history. His purpose may be described as a wish to develop a dynamic geography. Yet it would be unfair to treat him as blind to all other influ- ences affecting society. He distinctly recognized a certain diminuendo movement in history, so far as the relative influ- ence of physical environment is concerned. The view to which Ritter gave such prominence has been exploited with less balance by Buckle* and Draper.*® The essential thought which Ritter did so much to justify impressed President Gilman, of Johns Hopkins University, while he was still at Yale. He might have developed a sociology on the basis of geography, if he had not turned to administrative tasks.** Professor Geddes, of Edinburgh, is the most energetic expounder of this idea in the English-speaking world. Not the most prominent geographer, but the most scholarly expo- nent of this particular anthropo-geographical idea on the con- tinent today, is Ratzel, of Leipzig (Anthropo-Geographie).
* History of CiviltMation in England,
* Intellectual Development of Europe,
" Cf. Ripley, " Geography as a Sociological Study/' Political Science Quar- terly, December, 1895.
54 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
Ratzel, again, is to be classed with Herder and Ritter in pla- cing his peculiar perception in balance with co-operating forces. He aims to show the ways in which humanity depends upon the spatial relations of the earth. While the analysis of influ- ences from the environment, as carried out by Ratzel, is full of instruction, and while it opens up still uncultivated fields of research, it is still comparatively free from the fault of his- torical one-sidedness. Not so with men who have taken up this clue to history without the corrective which Ratzel expresses in the words: "Not nature, but mind, produces culture." For instance, MougeoUe** declares: "Thus the environment alone can truly explain the chief events of history, and furnish the solution of its most general problems." *•
As in the case of the individualistic conception of history, so with this exaggerated estimate of the part that nature has played in the formation of human society. Doubtless the social problem has waited longer than it ought for adequate formula- tion, because many men have too implicitly and literally believed with Plato that " ideas make the world." Such men have told the story of history as though it were a ghost-dance on a floor of clouds. They have tried to explain how spirits with negligible bodies have brought about the visible results. They would not admit that the facts of human associaticm have been the work of flesh-and-blood men with their feet on the grotmd. How much of the soil and the sunshine and the wind and snow and rain has lodged itself in men's works and ways remains to be determined. At all events, we have been taught by the contradictions of extremists that history in the future will neither be turned over entirely to the weather bureau, nor will it be exclusively the affair of the introspective rhapsodist. Human fortimes are not diluted climatology. They are not visualized spirituality, in any sense at least which we can comprehend. They are the resultant of physical and spiritual forces, reacting upon each other in the most complex
''U probUme d€ rhistoirt (Paris, x886).
" Cf. cbap. 30, sec. 4, " The Physical Environment"
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY S5
combinations which we know.^^ They will not be summed up in any simple equation of a single term. The views of history which exaggerate a co-operating factor into an exclusive factor, and assume that a constant influence is a mcmopoly of influence, are gradually forcing us to study new terms in the social problem. Each partial view of the influences that have made and remade men and associations gives us a distinct factor about which correlated search by the different kinds of sociologists must find means of answering the general question : " In what cases does this factor woiic ; with what tendencies does it work; with what ratio of force does it work?'' In other words, the sociological scheme which appropriates the lesscms of previous failure to penetrate the social mystery, will have a use for all accessible knowledge about the time, place, direction, and intensity of the purely topographical and climato- logical factors among social influences ; but for the same rea- son it will have an appropriate place also for all the other influences that may be discovered.
Barth's third title is The Ethnological View of History. It is not easy to draw a sharp line of division between this view and the second, just noticed. Of the two, the view now to be considered seems to have more prominence in today's social science. It appears less extravagant, less open to the suspicion of being crass materialism and mechanicalism, and therefore less taxing to the credulity. It is easier to see, or to imagine that we see, how the Teutons and the Romans could coalesce in a third something which turns out to be the Carolingian empire, than to see how the dust of one peninsula, stirred by one set of breezes, made Spartans, while the dust of another peninsula, vexed by other breezes, made Etruscans. The traditional belief that blood tells prepares a welcome in our minds for the stock-breeder's theory of history. It is supposed to have such backing in the findings of biology that the people who get the view fairly into their minds are strongly tempted
**Tliit necessary classification of forces is dnalistic merely in form. It rests upon a deeper monism.
56 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
to trust in its all-sufficiency, and to abandon further search for historical explanations. Indeed, the ethnologists and the ortho- dox economists are the closest competitors for the distinction of making a very narrow abstraction stretch to the utmost extension as a total explanation. The prestige of the ethno* logical view rests, however, upon very precarious support. Whether genetic laws large enough to explain any single his- torical movement have been demonstrated within the field of ethnology proper is open to serious question. Much that passes for severe ethnological science is merely ingenious speculation. Even if it is proved that races have been the vehicles of influ- ences which have affected different societies in different ways, it remains to be proved that the racial element was cause rather than effect of this influence, or of some other which was a more important cause. Moreover, many of the theorems of racial influence are theses in psychics rather than in ph}rsicdogy or zoology. They are dogmas in folk-psychology, not data or results of ethnology at all.
In this connection the most prominent ethnologists have failed to clarify their ideas. Such men as Topinard in France, and Tylor in England, and Brinton in this country have per- formed some grotesque straddles by defining ethnology as a physical science and then including in it every manifestation of man's complex nature. They have seemed to be uncertain, and they have surely left their readers uncertain, whether they were discovering physical traits, and then showing how these lend themselves to industrial and cultural development; or whether they were starting with mental developments and were reasoning back to differences of physical traits sufficient to account for the phenomena. In other words, the most eminent ethnologists have not yet shown themselves such patient investigators of the facts within their own field that their con- clusions have had a very profound effect upon la3rmen, espe- cially those who are experts in other branches of physical science.^' This is Ijkely to grow less and less true since more
** Cf. Cttmmings, " Ethnic Factors and the Movement of Popolation," Quarterly Journal of Economics, February, 1900.
THE HISTORY QF SOCIOLOGY 57
i carefully trained scholars are entering the ethnological field.
The work of many of these, however, tends to the opposite extreme of mere descripticm and classification of details, from which no general truth of large dimensions emerges. Hence the recent differentiation of the folk-psychologists. They are really only ethnologists of a new type. They are less first-hand discoverers of ethnological facts, and more interpreters of the material that collectors and classifiers place at their disposal. The two types together realize a division of labor that is bound to make ethnology a powerful ally of the other search-sciences in revealing the social mystery.
We need not deny that blood tells, but we should not be prematurely certain that we can hear what it tells, or that we can distinguish the voice of the particular blood that speaks. Whatever truth is to be found out along this line is apparently farther from present demonstration than the truths about the transmission of physical traits in general. It will doubtless be long before we shall be able to distinguish between proof in this field and fiction under a thin mask of illustration. Even if we were disposed to assume a priori that the whole truth lies in this directicMi, we should be phenomenally credulous to believe that the truth is already in sight, sufficient to make a science of society to be remotely compared in precision with either of the physical sciences. The one prominent result thus far of attempts to fit the ethnological assumpti(Mi to interpretation of the social mystery, has been to impress judicial investigators with the non-correspondence between the hypothesis and the evidence chiefly relied on for proof. Instead of making toward the conclusion that blood corpuscles in one race so differ from the blood corpuscles of another race that civiliza- tions are contrasted with each other in c(Misequence, the evi- dence makes for the conclusion that ideas weigh more than differences in animal tissue in determining what the traits of associated life shall be. This is the reason why ethnology is finding its most promising developments today in the line of ethnic or folk-psychology, which is only a cross-section of
58 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
mass-psychology. Each is a chapter of social psychology in general.
The problems of the relation of the animal organism to the spiritual nature of man seem at present to be in progress toward solution, if anywhere, in the psychological laboratories. People who deal with human phenomena in bulk are not likely to solve these problems, whatever they call themselves. They can merely deal with aspects of human facts which leave these fundamental questions unexplored. Whatever may be the form which our conclusions may one day take about the influ- ence of the body upon the mind, our interpretation of human events must have respect to this by-product of ethnological theory, namely, the observaticMi that different ethnic and tribal groups somehow come to be the vehicles of a tradition which, so far as effects appear, might as well be part and parcel of their physical structure. Their bodies and their tradition of thought and feeling constantly function together. The colored and the white elements in the United States, for example, are not made up of individuals of absolutely identical force in the social equation. A group of colored men and a group of white men, who had passed through schools of the same grade in the same city, would not be social forces of identical quality and equal energy, for the reason that they somehow carry along unlike traditions from tmlike conditions in the past. We may see these differences in men, and we should see them as they manifest themselves in racial peculiarities. On the other hand, we should not assume that these racial manifestations present to us irreducible factors of human force. That would be like a theory of chemistry which assumes that vapor and water and ice are three irreducible elements.
The final solution of the social mystery will have an answer to the question : " What is the value of the racial factor in the social equation?" Meanwhile, neither physiology nor zoology nor ethnology nor history lends sanction to the super- ficial assumption that the social equation is an affair of only one set of variables, namely, the racial characteristics of
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY 59
peoples. When we have in mind the ethnic factor in the social problem, it is necessary to render the sociological question in this form : " What is the formula of the racial factor in its combinations with all the other factors in the social equation ? "
Earth's fourth title is The Culture-History View}^ The very idea of "culture," as the term is used among German scholars, has hardly entered distinctly into American calcula- ticms. In order to indicate the view-point which is occupied by the interpreters to whom the title of this paragraph applies, it is necessary to define words in a way not yet adopted as a rule in English usage.
What, then, is "culture" (Kultur) in the German sense? To be sure, the Germans themselves are not wholly consistent in their use of the term, but it has a technical sense which it is necessary to define. In the first place, " culture " is a condition or achievement possessed by society. It is not individual. Our phrase "a cultured person" does not employ the term in the German sense. For that, German usage has another word, gebildet, and the peculiar possession of the gebildeter Mann is not " culture," but Bildung. If we should accept the German term " culture " in its technical sense, we should have no better equivalent for Bildung, etc., than "education" and "edu- cated," which convey too much of the association of school discipline to render the German conception in its entire scope. At all events, whatever names we adopt, there is such social possession, different from the individual state, which consists of adaptation in thought and action to the conditions of life.
Again, the Germans distinguish between "culture" and "civilization." Thus "civilization is the ennobling, the increased control of the elementary human impulses by society. Culture, on the other hand, is the control of nature by science and art." That is, civilization is one side of what we call politics; culture is our whole body of technical equipment, in the way of knowledge, process, and skill for subduing and
**€£. Tarde, Les transformations du pouvoir, pp. 187-90; Espinas, Let arigines de h technologic.
6o GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
employing natural resources, and it does not necessarily imply a high degree of socialization.'^
Now, there are very positive theories based on human tech- nology as the one determining factor, and even the efficient cause, of all social development. These views are indicated when Barth speaks of the "culture-history idea." The theorem is that men's ways of dealing with nature have been the cause of their spiritual life, and of their social and political conditions. Here belong at first glance all the numerous writers who have divided the history of the race into periods, according to the kind of tools or implements that men have used.*® It may be that the apparent importance of the method is not real enough to make their view quite as one-sided in this respect as the classification would indicate, but the S3rmptoms should be regarded as danger signals. For instance, when Dubois-Reymond divides historic times into three periods — namely ( i ) that of the building arts, bronze-casting, and stone- cutting; (2) that of the three inventions of the compass, gunpowder, and printing; (3) that of machinery moved by steam — he implies the one-sided culture view that men's inventions are the sole causes of their social condition. We might well ask of this view, as men at last asked of their mythologies: "If Atlas holds up the skies, who holds up Atlas?" If inventions cause social conditions, what causes inventions? Dubois-Re3rmond finds the cause of the fall of Rome in the fact that the Romans did not advance beyond the second of these three stages. He does not say whether the barbarians conquered Rome because they, too, had not advanced beyond the second stage! Of the culture-history view it is sufficient to say, with Barth :
The naturalists, technologists, and ethnologists accordingly start off on a false scent, if they try to make out that increase in the amount of
" Cf. below, chap. 24.
^Cf. Patten, "Theory of the Social Forces/' Annals of the American Academy, January, 1896; and Evolution of English Thought; also Ward, review of same, American Journal of Sociology, March, 1896.
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY 6i
"culture possessed" is the mainspring of human progress. In this case, as before, we find that all historical events, both progressive and retro- gressive, are phenomena of volition.'* The will is not moved, however, by endeavors after culture alone; but before and besides these endeavors are all sorts of other forces. Progress of culture is accordingly only one dement, and not the only one. In many periods it constitutes, indeed, only a feeble factor in the historical movement (P. a6i.)
We reach similar conclusions in turn about the ** political/' the " ideological," and the " economic " conceptions of history. Upon this last view a single paragraph may be cited from Barth:
But economics thus undertakes much more than it can accomplish. Economics is rather in peculiar need of dose connection with the history of the other branches of social life. In other words, economics needs sociology. Isolated from sociology, economics cannot even adequately determine fundamental conceptions. Thus Wagner* asks the question: "Is the limitation of the economic motive, that is, the effort to get a maximimi return for a minimum effort, desirable in itself, or attainable if desirable?" The answer will, without question, depend upon the assumed purpose of social life. Economics alone is incompetent to define this purpose. It is the affair of a comparative historical science like sociology, which works in conjunction with philosophy, that is, with the science of the highest theoretical and practical questions of humanity. In his Politics, that is, in his theoretical and at the same time practical sociology, Aristotle claimed that happy life is the proper purpose of the State, which to him was identical with society. His notion of happy life was more fully defined in his Ethics. His whole politics and economics would have been different if his ethics had been different So each modem system of economics takes form according to its assumed idea of the pur- pose of social life, that is, according to the sociology, and, in the final resort, the philosophy, from which it takes its departure. The isolation of economics has had as a consequence, so far as conceptions of history are concerned, only confusion.
Without resorting to further illustration from the phi- losophy of history, we may repeat that these snap- judgments about social laws, with all the dogmatism reinforced by them, have been so many rule-of-thumb attempts to do the thing which the sociologists want to do more scientifically. They
^Cf. below, chaps. 39 and 40.
^Grumdlegung der poUHscktn Oekonomie, 3d ed., Vol. I, pp. 9-1 j.
62 GENERAL SOaOLOGY
want to formulate precise problems. They want to bring valid methods of inquiry to bear upon the problems. They want to derive knowledge that will be prditable in all things civic.
At the same time, it has to be confessed that, as was hinted above, most of the sociology up to date has repeated in its way the same methodological errors which the philosophy of his- tory committed. Yet, although the sociologists have not been forearmed individually, as they might have been, with lessons taught by the mistakes of the philosophers of history, sociology is gradually assimilating those lessons. Moreover, sociology is profiting by the provincialisms of the pioneer sociologists. It is learning to find the element of truth in the clues upon which different men have attempted to build sociology. These premature schemes have accordingly served their purpose toward perfecting a method which, in its turn, will ultimately organize a body of knowledge.
CHAPTER V
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY (conHnugd)
The account which Barth gives of •'the sociologies" fails to bring into focus the fact noticed at the close of the previous chapter. The titles which he gives to the groups into which he divides the sociologists really beg very important questions. As in the case of the philosophers of history, use of Earth's groupings, however, will serve to bring out the necessary facts about gradual perceptions of what sociological problems involve. This continued reference to Barth is incidentally for the purpose of correcting a radical error in his exposition. It prevents comment upon some very important writers, but the main point at present is to show that Barth misconceives the facts when he schedules a series of "sociologies." Super- ficially, he is correct; but closer inspection shows that, con- sciously or unconsciously, the sociologists have been working upon one sociology. Exaggeration of some single factor in association, or of some single feature in method, does not con- stitute a special sociology. It contributes, directly or indirectly, positively or negatively, to the development of the one general philosophy.
Recapitulating our argument, we may say that all the stu- dents of society who properly belong in the gild of philoso- phers of history have virtually undertaken to interpret human life as too exclusively a function of some single influence, about which they have formed a priori conceptions. They have done their best to arrange all the knowledge about human life within their reach so that it would tally with this hy- pothesis of prevailing influence. Their method has exhibited only a minimum of positiveness or objectivity. In spite of this long-distance communication with reality, the philosophers of history have bequeathed to present social science a perception
63
64 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
of a complex problem, which may be stated in this form: " Given the fact of these influences, which are evidently real, in some degree of force, in human affairs; to discover when, how, in what proportions, under what conditions, and with what additional influences these factors operate in human associations."
While the philosophers of history have been shaping study of society in such fashion that students of society must inevitably propose their problem at last in the above form, dissatisfaction with the method of gaining knowledge has been growing. A few men have been moved by a feeling, rather than by a clear perception, that thet^ has been defective realism or objectivity in the treatment of human experience. They have virtually said to themselves: ''Let us plan methods of research by which we may know actual facts, to take the place of the irresponsible fancies with which social philosophers have been content to speculate." One outcome of this movement is modem sociology.
The implication is not intended that the sociologists have invariably been more scientific than the philosophers of his- tory. On the contrary, they have been, as a rule, equally and sometimes more unscientific. They have, however, undertaken more deliberate attempts to construct plans of research that would conform to the principles of exact science. The conse- quence is that, while sociology up to date can show compara- tively little in the way of absolutely new knowledge about society, it has accumulated a wealth of perception about the value of different portions of knowledge, and about ways in wjhich knowledge of society must be tested and organized. Although these perceptions are not yet co-ordinated in any system which is generally accepted by sociologists, there is an unformulated consensus about standards of objectivity and correlation which is steadily reducing sociological speculation to the soberness of observational and experimental science.^
^ " Unfortunately, the relation of facts is always less simple than we think ; the demand of our intellect for unity is often a little too strong, especially in
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY 65
Each of the chief types of sociological theory has contrib- I uted something to this result. Perhaps the largest contribu-
tions have been not direct, but indirect. There may be close parallelism here between the merit of the sociologists and that of the philosophers of history. The share of the sociologists in the result may be quite different from the spirit of their own premises. We may trace, however, in the progress of sociological theory, first, a reaction and a protest against speculative social philosophy; second, a struggle by men still wearing the shackles of speculative tradition to perfect a posi- tive method; third, attrition among quasi-positive methods. Reciprocal criticism of schools and programs of sociological I inquiry has been the order of the day, and unforttmately the
chief employment^ of the sociologists. Out of all this prelimi- nary maneuvering a sociological method is emerging. It is an organization of ways of knowing society as it is. This is a substitute for the ways in which people thought about society without knowing it as it is. We shall comment upon certain typical proposals of sociological method, for the purpose of illustrating this last proposition.
A. The importance of classification, — Disregarding earlier prophets of scientific method, we may consider Comte (1798- 1857). It is worth while to emphasize the contribution of Comte to the method of sociology, not because his method in his own hands accomplished much that is in itself memorable, but because he made the inevitable problem more obvious. He defined it more precisely than it had been defined before.
the realm of social science. Hasty conclusions are stlU the order of the day. One assumes something, not because it is so, because one has actually so observed it, but because it would agree so finely with something else. This is all very unscientific, but it suits our best thinkers not seldom. Really, we pro- ceed StlU from the theory and seek facts merely for illustration. If one does otherwise, starts from the facts and goes no farther than they permit, then people are astonished Uiat his result is not so beautifully rounded off, not so faultless, as their own fancies. That the latter, even if ever so consistent, harmonious, complete, are yet absolutely worthless — that does not appear to such people." (Steinmetz, Zeitschrift fUr Socialwissenschaft, August, 1898.)
66 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
His point of departure is indicated in the following proposi- ti(xis:
It cannot be necessary to prove to anybody who reads this work that ideas govern the world or throw it into chaos; in other words, that all social mechanism rests upon opinion. The great political and moral crises that societies are now undergoing are shown by a rigid analysis to arise out of intellectual anarchy. While stability in fundamental maxims is the first condition of genuine social order, we are suffering from an utter dis- agreement which may be called universal. Till a certain number of general ideas can be acknowledged as a rallying-point of social doctrine, the nations will remain in a revolutionary state, whatever palliatives may be devised ; and their institutions can only be provisional. But whenever the necessary agreement on first principles can be obtained, appropriate institutions will issue from them without shock or resistance; for the causes of disorder will have been arrested by the mere fact of the agreement. It is in this direction that those must look who desire a natural and regular, a normal state of society.'
Accordingly, Comte attempted to classify the sciences. His fundamental principle was described as follows :
We may derive encouragement from the examples set by recent botanists and zoologists, whose philosophical labors have exhibited the true principle of classification, namely, that the classification must proceed from the study of the things to be classified, and must by no means be deter- mined by a priori considerations. The real affinities and natural con- nections presented by objects being allowed to determine their order, the classification itself becomes the expression of the most general fact.*
Upon this basis Comte classified the sciences in his well- known hierarchy: astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology, and social physics; mathematics being treated as antecedent to all the sciences.
Comte's ideas of method are further illustrated by his use of the distinction between statical and dynamical relations. On this point he says :
This division, necessary for purposes of exploration, must not be stretched beyond that use. The distinction becomes weaker with the advance of science. We shall see that, when the science of social physics is fully constituted, this division will remain, for analytical purposes, but not as a real separation of the science into two parts. The distinction is
'Positive Philosophy, Introduction. 'Ibid., Book I, chap. 2.
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY 67
not between two classes of facts, but between two aspects of a theory. It corresponds with the double conception of order and progress; for order consists in a perfect harmony among the conditions of social existence; and progress consists in social development; and the conditions in the one case and the laws of movement in the other constitute the statics and dynamics of social physics.
Further peculiarities of Comte's method are alluded to by Barth as follows :
We find in Comte's proposal an antithesis, namely, on the one hand he insists that the social series is a continuation of the animal series, but it is impossible to deduce the one from the other. The development of society cannot be traced to the peculiarities of individuals. Sociology cannot be derived from physiology, however important biology may be in laying foundations for sociology. Biology furnishes only certain general notions; for example, that of evolution, the specialization of organs, solidarity, etc On the other hand, the positive law of evolution, according to Comte, is that of the three states, namely, the theological, the meta- physical, and the positive. This, however, is not a biological, but an q^isteinological principle.
In view of this antinomy in Comte, the fact of value for our purpose is not the intrinsic merit or demerit of his theory of the three states. That theorem is not close enough to reality to deserve any attention except as a curious conceit long since discredited at the author's valuation. The impor- tant point is that the conceit, although incorrect, posited a mental, not a physical, principle, as the clue to the social mys- tery. Comte had a rigidly mechanical conception of the forms in which the social principle works, but he still had a pre^ sentiment that the principle itself is not mechanical. Comte is therefore not a successful monist. In his scheme these two elements are left antithetical, as must always be the case so long as we confine ourselves to descriptions of phenomena. The physical and the spiritual aspects of phenomena may be assumed to be manifestations of one underlying reality, but no one has succeeded in making that unity visible.^
It is accordingly not surprising that the followers of Comte took two divergent courses. Some of them pursued the
* Cf. below, pp. 78-82.
68 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
spiritual clue ; others worked in accordance with the mechani- cal or physiological conception. It would have been very natural if those followers of Comte who were most impressed by the spiritual conception in his doctrine had emphasized the idea which superficial readers have always fixed upon as the most important part of his teaching, namely, his division of human experience into the three stages. With more correct insight, or instinct, however, the tendency which we have now to notice followed rather the methodological clue in the doc- trine than its material content.
We have noticed how important in Comte's mind was the principle of classification. Beginning with the simpler sciences, and continuing through the subject-matter of all science, including sociology, Comte insisted upon classification dictated by the peculiarities of the things classified. Thus classification with Comte is itself science. To know enough about objects or facts to arrange them in scientific classes, we must obviously have enough knowledge of their essential peculiarities to mark a good degree of scientific progress. Conversely, an attempt in the Comtean spirit to classify the subject-matter chosen as a scientific field amounts to a pledge that the things to be classi- fied will be duly investigated, so that their likenesses and differences may be known. For this reason those writers whom Barth calls the "classifying sociologists" deserve sin- cere respect, whether the categories which they have proposed prove permanent or not. Their attempt has been to discover those essential attributes of social facts which constitute marks of likeness or unlikeness. So far as it goes, this search for the signs of similarity and dissimilarity is true science, provided it observes scientific principles in deciding what are the qualities attributed to the subject-matter in question. It is not an invention of the sociologists. It is merely a sign on the part of the sociologists that they have so far heeded the lessons taught by the maturer sciences.
Among the followers of Comte there has not been due observance of the limitation just suggested. Descriptive analy-
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY ' 69
sis is logically presupposed as a condition of validity in genetic classification, or in causal analysis, which is another aspect of the same thing. Social facts and forces have been arranged in classes by sociologists whose haste to reach genetic classifica- tion has made them neglect necessary descriptive analysis. This criticism may be applied at once to De Greef. His famous schedule of social phenomena involves a thesis about the order in which those phenomena emerge.* That hypothesis turns the schedule, to a certain extent at least, into a genetic classifica- tion. In that character De Greef 's proposition is more than questionable. As a descriptive analysis for certain purposes it has not been excelled. We may then at once set down to the credit of the sociologists of this group a commendable begin- ning of the process of grouping like social facts. This is a necessary preliminary in all science. The "classifying soci- ologists" have been criticised, not so much because they did not do their part well, as because the critics did not see that this part was worth doing at all. Such judgments condemn the critics rather than the criticised.® Classification isi not the whole of science, but it is an essential stage in the scientific process. The men who belittle it tend to disregard the author- ity of facts, and to claim scientific authority for their gener- alizations independent of facts.
The processes that have given the group-name to the "classifying sociologists" have sometimes been called col- lectively "descriptive sociology." This term stands for all that is involved in arranging the material facts in classified order, without attempt to enter upcMi the next step, namely, interpretation. Whether this designation is to be permanent, experience alone can decide.
A passage from Barth is pertinent at this point :
According to Comte, sciences must be parallel with things. When we
* Introduction d la sociology. Vol. I, p. 217,
* E. g., Giddings, Principles of Sociology, p. la. Professor Giddxngs speaks of such work as " constructiag a doctrine by inventory instead of by abstrac- tion." Of course, there could be no valid abstraction in default of an inven- tory of the items from which the abstraction is drawn.
70 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
arrange the latter according to their decreasing generality, and their increasing complexity, we have at the same time their actual correlation. Just so, when we arrange the sciences according to the same principle, we have the sequence of their origin, that is, their history. Since the same logical motives which operate in humanity as a whole are in force also in the individual, he not only may but must repeat in himself the develop- mental course through which the knowledge of the race has passed. Other- wise his development is incomplete. He must, in other words, recapitulate in himself the history of science. Comte's classification of the sciences, accordingly, purports to be, not merely descriptive, but at the same time genetic and reconstructive/
The idea was close at hand that the same should be done for society which Comte tried to do for the world at large and for general science. A subdivision of society, from its most general to its most complicated phenomena, was attempted by Comte only incidentally and imperfectly. Accordingly, he produced no classifications in sociology that satisfy his pro- gram of scientific division. If this omission could be supplied, it would mean, according to the presuppositions of the Comtean system, that we should have, not merely a division of social phenomena, but also the way in which society came into being and grew to its present state.
This idea is the clue to the significance of those " classifying sociologists," as they are named by Barth, who have attempted to complete Comte's work. The best representative of this group is De Greef.® His methodological merit in applying and developing the Comtean idea consists primarily in carrying the attempt to classify phenomena, and consequently sciences, into the societary realm. Some of his most characteristic work has been in connection with his proposal of a hierarchy of societary' phenomena and of societary science. Selecting
^On Comte'8 hierarchy vide Spencer, The Genesis of Science (1854), reprinted in Essays, Vol. I, p. 116. Also Vol. Ill, p. 13, and Recent Discussions, p. 124; also Fiske, Cosmic Philosophy, Vol. I, pp. 185, 319, et passim,
' Introduction d la sociologie (2 vols., Paris, 1886-89) 1 and Vol. Ill, a translation of which b^an to appear in the American Journal of Sociology, Vol. VIII, p. 478; Les his sociologiques (Paris, 1893); L,e trans formisme social (Paris, 1895) * devolution des croyances et des doctrines politiques (Paris, 1895).
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY 71
De Greef as a representative of the classifying tendency, we appropriate Earth's account with certain variations.* De Greef's idea is that classification of the sciences has more than a merely subjective significance. If it is successfully objective, it reproduces the real interdependencies of things in particular and of reality as a whole. The universal is the least dependent. That which rests upon it is the more dependent, the more special it becomes. It is in the same degree more modifiable. For teleological theory this consideration is car- dinal. It is useless to apply effort to the unchangeable. Effort is practical in proportion as it is applied to the changeable. Hence the desirability of finding out the degrees of generality among societary phenomena as a basis for programs of ameliorative action.
De Greef regards inattention to the foregoing principle as the reason for poverty of results in sociology since Ccwnte. Society is not simplicity, but extreme complexity. Comte wanted society to be regarded as a whole. He wanted explana- tion of its parts to proceed from explanation of the whole, instead of procedure from the parts to the whole. He did not encourage study of the isolated parts. Referring possibly to Comte's fourfold division of societary evolution in the modem \ world — namely, the industrial, the aesthetic, the scientific, and the philosophical**^ — De Greef seems to have attributed to Comte a classification which cannot be found in the Positive Philosophy. At all events, he argues that Comte did not draw the obvious practical conclusions from subdivisions of the phenomena." De Greef's motive, then, is desire to furnish a scale of societary activity that will show decreasing orders of generality, increasing orders of complexity, and consequently relative susceptibility of artificial modification.
De Greef s point of departure is selection of a psychical factor — contract — to mark the division line between the
* pp. 67 ff. Cf. conspectus of De Greefs scheme, below, p. 235. ^Positive Philosophy, Vol. VI, pp. 51. S3, 54, 5^- ^Introduction, Vol. I, p. 22S.
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physical and the social Upon the basis of conclusion that Spencer's criteria of distinction between the physical and the social are merely quantitative and mechanical instead of quali- tative (i. e., the greater distance between the elements and the distribution of consciousness among the elements), De Greef claims that neither Comte nor Spencer has adduced adequate reasons for separating sociology from biology.** Throughout De Greef's work the differentiating factor of human volition is insisted upon as marking a separate body of phenomena.
Up to this point we have practically no controversy with Barth as to the significance of the classifying tendency. It is, however, a mistake to seek in such a writer as De Greef important contributions to knowledge of the concrete. As in the case of the one-sided views of history, we get some methodological details from inspection of the method of approaching reality represented by De Greef. His classifica- tion is in essence a series of theses to be tested. In the classi- fication the elements of social activity are made more distinct than in any previous classification. His claim with reference to the hierarchical order of the phenomena so arranged must stand or fall as a result of specific investigation of the activities and subactivities distinguished in the schedule. Sociological method is chang^, however, by this scheme of categories, from a confused dumping together of miscellaneous informa- tion, as called for by Spencer's famous catalogue of what his- tory should teach,** to an orderly arrangement of phenomena according to scientific principles of classification. This is not to assert that De Greef 's classification is final. It has, however, admirably served the purpose of tentative analysis of social activities, while criticism of the characteristics of the activities is proceeding.
Barth discusses under the present subtitle Lacombe** and
"Introduction, Vol. I, pp. 19-23.
"Vide below, pp. 109, no.
"De I'histoire considMe comme science (Paris, 1894).
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY 73
Wagner.^* Neither of these writers has added anything of value to the portion of methodology with which we are con- cerned, and we may allow De Greef to stand as the representa- tive of the classifying tendency.
Recurring to the claim made above,^^ and in accordance with our argument upon the different philosophies of history, we repeat our conclusion with reference to the different emphases in sociological methodology, viz.: Each has con- tributed something to be worked in some way or other into the final sociology. It is not strictly accurate to speak of a " classi- fying sociology." Certain men have won recognition for the fact that classification is a necessary element in scientific » method, but classification was not beginning and end of their
conception of sociology. It was one of the means of develop- ing a sociology. It would be as fair to describe the woiic of succeeding generations of farmers in this country by the phrases: "the tree-felling agriculture," "the stump-pulling agriculture," "the plowing agriculture," "the rock-picking agriculture," and "the rotation-of-crops agriculture." The men who had to give most of their strength to the different partial processes respectively may have had all the other pro- cesses as clearly in mind as though circumstances permitted their use. The feller of trees functioned with reference to rotation of crops just as truly as the men who lived to practice it. So of the men who emphasized the need of sociological classification.
Classification is an arrangement of abstractions around selected centers of interest. No single classification can ever visualize the social reality, because that reality presents as many aspects as there are subjective centers of attention. The object <;ut up into abstractions has to be represented by com- "bination of all the classifications which our alternative centers of interest incite us to make. These alternative classifications cannot be put together in any hierarchical order, if faithfulness
^Grundlegung der poliiitchen Oekonomie, 3d ed. (Leipzig, 1892).
74 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
to reality is to be maintained. To visualize the social reality, it is necessary to learn how to think these classifications as they shoot through and through each other in objective fact, forming the most complicated plexus ever observed. If we try to symbolize or formulate this plexus in categories appropriate to any lesser order of complexity, we shall either give up in despair, or we shall rest satisfied with falsification of the reality.
B. The use of biological figures. — No scientific movement has been more misunderstood by both friends and foes than that phase of sociological thought to which the present title applies. Barth exemplifies radical misconception of the situa* tion in using the title " the biological sociology." The essential idea which has supplied impulse and suggestion to all the investigators in this group is that ever3rthing somehow hangs together with everything else ; as the French phrase it : " Tout se tient dans ce monde ici-bas." It is further assumed that science is incomplete until it includes discovery of the forms and principles of this coherence. In other words, the emphasis here is upon the organic concept, not upon biological analogies in formulating the concept. Not merely in sociology, but in every department of knowledge, the organic concept is the most distinctive modern note. It has been a serious oversight and ^blunder to confound the organic concept with the non- tssential device of employing biological analogies when using "ihe concept. Accidents in connection with this merely technical detail have been magnified by some thinkers into essentials, and misrepresented by others as the substance of the subject- matter in question. At best they are means of finding out and reporting a certain portion of reality.
The most intimate and complex and constructive coherence of elements that we discover, previous to our study of society,* is the coworking of part with part in vital phenomena.. About a generation ago, men who wanted to understand the social reality more precisely began to make systematic use of ascer- tained vital relationships as provisional symbols of societary
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY 75
relationships. In general, it has been true from the beginning that the so-called biological sociology has not been biological at all, except in its figurative modes of expression/ Men have detected apparent analogies between better understood vital processes and less understood societary processes.*^ They have said virtually : " So long as terms of these vital processes put us in the way of approaching more truth about societary pro- cesses, let us use them as means to that end." Following this clue, descriptive analyses and many interpretations of social relations have been worked out in biological terms.
It is not absolutely certain that any single writer who has been taken seriously by the sociologists has ever been a
• " biological sociologist " in any other sense than the foregoing.
There have been many lapses into linguistic usage that prima fade meant a very fantastic literalism. In general, however, the use of biological figures has amounted to about this: There are functional relationships between men in association that are analogous with functicMial relationships between parts of living bodies. No analogies seem to be closer,' on the whole,
' to the societary facts than those in biological facts. We will,
therefore, follow out these clues. We will discover all the biological analogies we can. We will test the closeness of the similarities. We will make them divulge all the truth possible about the literal terms of social relationships. We will report these discoveries in biological metaphor, if no better medium of expression is available. We will get nearer to the truth with some other medium of expression, whenever we can invent it. With occasional exceptions, the objections that have been urged to this use of organic analogies may be charged chiefly to a mental condition which Dr. George Dana Boardman aptly termed " defect of the analogical imagination." *®
"The convene was for a time the case. Vide Annals of the American Academy, March, 1895, p. 745. Cf. Small and Vincent, Introduction to the Study of Society, pp. 87-96 ; Small, in a notice of Schaffle, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. II, p. 31X ; ibid,. Vol. IV, p. 411 ; ibid.. Vol. V, p. 276.
»Cf. Spencer, "The Social Organism," Westminster Review, Januaty, i860, and revised in his Essays; also Ward, American Journal of Sociology,
76 GENERAL SOaOLOGY
In order to deal properly with the actual use which has been made of biological analogies, it would be necessary to dis- cuss at length Lilienfeld, Spencer, and Schaffle. This would take us too far afield. For our present purpose we may assume such a review. After all the controversy about the organic concept, the gist of the whole matter is that knowledge of human associations involves knowledge of the most com- plex interdependence of function that has been discovered in the whole realm of reality. Precise formulas of the inter- relations of functions among associated men are mostly desiderata for future social science to supply. Meanwhile, approximate statements of social relationships must employ the best available means of expression. At our present stage of knowledge, our insights into the social mystery express themselves most adequately, in certain of their phases at least, in biological figures. In other words, there are vast reaches of societary fact our present apprehension of which falls into S)mibolical expression in biological forms more conveniently and satisfactorily than into any alternative mode of expression. This proposition recognizes the provisional and inexact char- acter of such expression. The use of biological terms to symbolize societary relationships is, therefore, desirable CMily so long and so far as they are on the whole better vehicles of expression than any available substitutes. Beyond that the device is a snare and a delusion.
For these reasons, we repeat, the title "biological soci- ology" is a misnomer.*® There is a method of presenting problems and of stating results in sociology by means of bio- logical terms. That method does not make, nor wish to make, the subject-matter biological, any more than the graphic
Vol. I, p. 317, and Vol. Ill, p. 360. For the most recent discussion of the biological method of expression tnde Annales de VInstitut intemaiionai de Sociologie, Vols. IV and V.
^ In his paper, " The Failure of Biologic Sociology," Annals of American Academy, May, 1894, Professor Patten has disposed of certain real errors, but his blows are delivered chiefly at straw men, so far as the epithet " biologic " is concerned.
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY r?
•
method of presenting statistics makes the subject-matter geographical.
To be sure, Lilienfeld, Spencer, Schaffle, and a numerous host who have lighted their tapers from these flames, have sometimes appeared to carry symbolism into realism. They have sometimes seemed to treat society as though it were the last term in the zoological series. Whatever faults of this sort may be on record, they do not lie along the trunk line of advance from Comte to securely scientific sociology. They are excursions whid^call for very little attention at present.
Apart from the men, if there are any such, who actually think that society is a big animal, the investigators who have use for biological figures in connection with societary relation- ships no more convert their subject-matter into biology, by using organic metaphors, than use of Arabic notation in astronomy would convert the subject-matter into Semitic philology. The term "biological sociology'* implies wh^t is not and never has been true of that which is most essential in the method to which it applies. The assumption of the critics is that, behind all use of the biological terms, there is a sup- position contrary to fact; namely, that society is a zoological species. The truth is that the method thus misunderstood does not assume that human associations are anything at all except a plexus of relationships formed by the mingling together of many human beings.**^
The method starts, however, with the perception that has coined the sociological axiom: "All men are functions of each other." Setting out with this perception of the com- plexity of associations between men, these particular soci- ologists, as we have said above, cast about for relationships of
"The men who hare made most use of biological terms in sociology might without strain or shock accept the starting-point and the methodological policy implied in Tdnnies' formula: " .... for a working hypothesis we may say that society is a crowd of indiVidoals scattered over a particular terri- tory, who do business peaceably with each other, and enforce the observation of certain rules of conduct " (" Zur Einleitung in die Seciologie/* Zeitschrift fur Philosophie und phihsophische Kritik, January, 1900).
78 GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
•
eqqal or like complexity. They found none apparently more similar in that respect than those between parts of animal organisms. Scientific study of animal organisms has pro- gressed relatively farther than scientific study of human asso- ciations. It serves to spur the imagination and to sharpen the curiosity of investigators who want to know the literal truth about the social reality. For these reasons biological science has been called to the assistance of sociologists, not merely in furnishing truth about the physiological substructure of human associations, but in furnishing thought-appliances for investi- gation of those relationships which are beyond the competence of biology. It is thus sheer muddle-headedness to confuse the tool of investigation, and the medium of expression, with the supposed nature of the portion of reality investigated.
It must be admitted that some of the most perspicuous thinking on this subject has uttered itself in language that encourages this confusion. It has doubtless been a mistake to allow the terminology of sociological inquiry to seem to over- shadow in importance the subjects of inquiry themselves. Sociologists who are perfectly free from uncertainty about the above distinction have frequently used terms in a way that has prevented less discerning persons from reaching the distinction. The phrase "biological sociology," whether used with correct or incorrect connotations, has always been unfortunate in this respect. It seems to imply what has been denied above. Hence it is to be pronounced a misnomer, whether adopted by friends or applied invidiously by foes.
It must be admitted, too, that use of biological figures is worth only what it is worth. Its utility depends largely upon the temper, training, and taste of the investigator, or, in the case of teachers, upon the mental content of their pupils. Doubtless much discovery among social relationships may be made by men whose method of approach and whose form of expression are predominantly mathematical, or mechanical, or philosophical. Whatever may be claimed to the contrary, the prevailing note in sociology, from Comte down to the
>t
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY 79
present time, has been belief in a psychical something and somehow, marking a sphere of societary reaHty distinct in thought from physical reality. This proposition is not intended in a dualistic sense, although it may have been true in that sense of some men. It is used here in a sense in which the stoutest mcmist might employ the terms, namely : sociologists actually distinguish orders of fact and process which we cannot yet reduce to terms of a single unity, no matter how sure we may be that the underlying unity exists. Though we may be monistic in our theory of reality, we are necessarily dualistic, if not pluralistic, in our apprehension of phenomena.^^ Accord- ingly, every form of expression whatever which tends to obliterate the distinction in consciousness between the physical and the psychical in societary relationships must be regarded as a crudity in our symbolism. We all regard the social reality as something that cannot be reported accurately in terms of factors less elementary than the attributes of human individuals. Whether we shall symbolize what we can find out about asso- ciations of individuals in terms of quantity, or quality, or form, or function, or ideal conception; or how much of each sort of symbol we shall employ, is purely a question of tech- nique, not to be settled by any stereotyped formula.
With all the dangers of abuse, the device of physiological symbolism has very considerable advantages at certain points, although it is a stumbling-block to men who lack " the ana- logical imagination." The use of the device for what it is worth will not be discouraged by dogmatism or misrepresenta- tion or ridicule. It has a quite incomparable pedagogical yalue within wise limits, and it is likely to be more or less useful, even to investigators, for a long time to come. Indeed, there is not a sociologist in the world who can write upon any part of sociology today, even if his subject -be the total depravity of "the biological method," without framing some of his own arguments in tropical use of biological terms.^^ We cannot
"Cf. above, p. 67.
"How it would have scandalized the critics of "biological sociology" if
8o GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
think the social complexity to the limit of our ability to appre- hend it, without assistance from the next lower degree of com- plexity that we know. The extent of our use of this aid is a mere matter of detail, and must be determined by expediency. C. The investigation of dynamic laws. — In the case of the philosophers of history we saw that any characterization is inaccurate which purports to distinguish all that their con- ceptions contain. Not merely in such an instance as that of Herder, but likewise, though in less* degree, in case of the most contracted view, each philosophy of history leaves some room for factors not thrown into prominence in its formulations. The like is true of the sociologists. Each group manifests something of all the tendencies which peculiarly mark the other groups. Under the present head we are to consider a portion of the group in which Barth places Lester F. Ward, J. S. Mackenzie, Hauriou, and Franklin H. Giddings. Barth's title for the group is "The Dualistic Sociology." Except in the case of Professor Giddings, we may waive the question whether the most significant resemblances and differences of method justify classification of these men in the same group. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that their methods are
anyone outside of their own number had suggested "social anastomosis" or "social inosculation" 1 Vide Tarde, Les trans formaHons du pouvoir, p. 8; and Ward, Purg Sociology, p. 30. Professor Ross has often turned his fund of sarcasm against the biological method of expression, but he so far fotgets himself as to indulge in liberties like the following : " .... a man .... will cast into the stock of ideas circulating through the capillaries of intercourse ( I) only those which are . not hateful or shocking to his readers " (American Journal of Sociology, Vol. V, p. 765). Professor Giddings also, who has been most pronounced in his disapproval of biological terms, drops into use of them very frequently in his own writing. For instance : " Thus the modification of social units by one another, the modification of society by its units, and the modification of the units of society are always organic phenomena; they are processes of psychological assimilation and biological evolution " (Principles of Sociology, p. 399)- Again, he says: "We have, in short, materials for a structural sociology — a descriptive social anatomy" (Inductive Sociology, p. 29). Ratzenhofer says : " Der Staat als hoheres Socialgebilde gleicht den hoheren Organismen, in welchen sich die Zahl der Organe vermehrt, um dem Totalzweck des Ganzen besser entsprechen zu - konnen " (Sociologische Erkenntniss, p. 165) ; etc., etc.
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY 8x
sufficiently alike to place the first three in a group by them- selveSy we must insist that the group is neither adequately nor fairly classified by the phrase " the dualistic sociology."
We may concede that Comte was predominantly material- istic and mechanical in his conceptions, though we have seen that even among his views an insistent spiritualism had a place, and that he had no self-ccMisistent synthesis of the two phases of reality. Whether we count Comte as an example or an exception, there is nobody in the whole series of men who have made an impression upon sociology to whom the epithet " dualistic " would not apply as properly in the last analysis as to the men here named. In point of fact, all the i^ilosophers in the world today are dualists in the sense indicated above. The fact that a few will not admit the impotence of their for- mal monism does not affect the proposition. That is to say, no matter how prominent the assertion of fundamental unity may be in our philosophy today, there is practically no difference of opinion as to the methodological necessity of recognizing a phenomenal duality.'* The diversity of matter and spirit must be admitted by all to this extent, namely : whether we assert an underlying tmity or not, we cannot successfully express what we see in the objective world without describing elements that seem distinct in quality. That which is phencMnenally psychic is not reducible by any meaiis at our disposal to terms of physics.
On the other hand, it may be said with equal truth that there are today no philosophers of any influence who are not in the last analysis monists. However vigorously they may insist upon the phenomenal distinction between the spiritual and the physical, they assume sooner or later that underneath the duality of appearance there is an inscrutable unity of reality. It is accordingly a mark of inferior rather than of superior insight to characterize philosophers as monistic or dualistic. Practically all philosophy today is monistic in its ontological presumption; it is dualistic or pluralistic in its
"Cf. above, p. 67,
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analytical methods and in its classification of phenomena. In the case of the sociologists the epithet is of very doubtful utility in any instance.** It is certainly so in the case of the men named by Barth in this group.*** Ward makes the physical element, which must be taken account of by the sociologist, so prominent in the scale that he has more than once been denounced as a materialist. On the other hand, his distinctive effort has been to get for the psychic factors in social reactions due recognition and adequate formulation. If we use the term " dualistic " as a mark of commendation, it is appro- priate to this group. The men named deserve praise for their efforts to show that a psychic as well as a physical phase of the underlying unity is wrought into, and must be recognized in, the social complexity.
More precisely, the significance of Ward is historically this : He first published (1883) when the influence of Herbert Spencer was probably at its height. In sociology that influence amounted to obscuration of the psychic element, and exaggera- tion of the physical factors concerned in shaping social com- binations. Whatever be the fair estimate of Spencer's total influence upon sociology, it certainly operated for a time to concentrate attention upon the mechanical and vital elements in social combinatipns, and to obscure the psychic elements which are in excess of the physical. While the Spencerian influence was uppermost, the tendency was to regard social progress as a sort of mechanically determined redistribution of energy which thought could neither accelerate nor retard. Against this tendency Ward, a most energetic monist, opened a crusade. He undertook to show that mind can control the con- ditions of human life to such an extent that it is possible to inaugurate a new and better era of progress. According to Ward, there is a difference so great between the progress of
** Especially as it is a term witlioot meaning, ttnless it bean the tag of the particular doctrine from whose view-point the fault is alleged.
"This Tiew of the error in Barth's characterization was expressed almost simultaneously with the original publication of this chapter by M. Alessaodro Groppali, Annates de VInsHtut de Sodologie, Vol. VI, p. 262,
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY 83
the past and the progress to be anticipated when mind shall have applied itself to the problem, that we may speak of the latter as artificial progress and the former as accidental progress.**
At the time of its publication (1890) Mackenzie's book, *^ An Introduction to Social Philosophy, was the ablest survey that had been made of the whole field properly so designated. Nothing that has since appeared has made the boc^ obsolete, although the strategic points in sociological inquiry have shifted greatly, and have become in many respects more salient since he wrote. It is a mistake on Earth's part to represent Mackenzie as the exponent of any particular type of sociology. He did most successfully what he attempted. In his preface he says :
Little, if anything, of what is now published can be claimed as original .... It is scarcely necessary to add that this work is not intended as a systematic treatise on the subject with which it deals, but only as a slight contribution to the discussion of it. It is, indeed, not so much a book as an indication of the lines on which a book might be written. The only merit which I can hope it may be found to possess is that it has brought into close relation to each other a number of questions which are usually, at least in England, treated in a more disconnected way. (P. viii.)
Mackenzie's work has been appraised by the sociologists generally at a higher valuation than the author's modest esti- mate claims. It not only furnished a conspectus of relation- ships which had frequently been confused or ignored, but by so doing it promoted systematic sociological inquiry. It thus deserves a high place among the factors that have developed sociological method. It tried to make real the subject-matter of sociological inquiry, and to indicate in large outline the manner in which approach must be made to knowledge of this reality. This is plain from the author's own summary.*'^ Professor Mackenzie carefully guards against calling himself a sociologist at all. That he is an exponent of a special type of sociology in Earth's sense is, we repeat, a mistake. He has
" De Greef expressed a simthir view in 1891 : Les loig sociologiques, p. 31. " First edition, pp. 369 ff.
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certainly contributed a large share toward the introduction of sanity into thought about social relations. He has not attempted, however, to influence sociological method except in the general way above indicated.
Hauriou is for our purposes a wholly negligible quantity.^* Professor Giddings stands for certain tendencies which deserve distinct mention under another head. We accordingly return to Ward as the proper representative of the phase of metho- dolojgy to which the title of this section refers.
We must observe once more that none of the methods with which we are dealing entirely lacks or entirely monopolizes any factor of scientific process. Ward, for instance, did not invent the quest for formative social influences. Men had been searching for them since the world began. When Ward wrote Dynamic Sociology, however, the sociological fashion set by Spencer was to treat social forces as though they were mills of the gods which men could at most learn to describe, but which they might not presume to organize and control. Ward did not declare independence of the natural conditions within which the human problem has to be worked out. He declared that we may learn physical conditions, and at the same time mental conditions, to such purpose that we may eventually make human progress a scientific program. His emphasis, then, was upon knowledge of the effective forces in social con- ditions, with ultimate reference to deliberate telic application.**
Altogether apart, then, from any specific theorems to which Ward committed himself, his work has a secure place as a force making for modification of the aims of sociological theory. It is Comte, to be sure, from whom Ward takes his cue, but Comte had no scientific standing-ground broad and firm enough to permit clear prevision. Spencer was virtually training prevision backward. The primary meaning of Ward's
^ La science sociale traditionelle (Paris, 1896).
" Vide I St ed., Preface, p. tU ; Vol. I, p. 81 ; and Vol. II, p. 159. For Spencer's unlike views vide Social Statics, American ed. of 1892, pp. 233 ff.; also De Greet, Introduction, Vol. II, p. 13.
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appearance in the sociological field was that a bold campaign of advance was proclaimed. He virtually said : '' It is possible to know enough about the conditions of the conduct of life to guide society in a deliberate program of progress. Let us pro- ceed, then, to organize knowledge and research, with the definite purpose of applying it to social progress. Let us not be content longer merely to analyze and describe what has taken place in the past without the assistance of knowledge at its best. Let us get familiar with the factors of human prog- ress, and when we have learned to understand them let us use them to the utmost for human improvement."
Ward is by profession a biologist (palaeontological botany). He would naturally give full faith and credit to all those ele- ments in human conditi(Mis which the physical sciences must explore. With this taken for granted, he proposed to learn particularly the conditions of psychic cause and effect in society. He demanded inquiry into the laws of psychic action, for the purpose of molding society ; just as we learn the laws of i^ysics in order to build houses or bridges or engines. While the emphasis of other sociologists at the time was upcxi the ways in which non-sentient nature works, Ward demanded knowledge of how mind combines its work with that of the non-sentient factors of htunan conditions. Thus Ward called for knowledge of that neglected factor of reality which is the differentiating element when phenomena emerge from the stage of unconsciousness and become conscious.*^
Without attempting to weigh the specific results of Ward's effort, we must, in the interest of clear thinking, do justice to his aim and to his general conception of method. He demands investigation of the psychic element of societary facts that shall be in all respects comparable with the investigations of the physical basis of life which the appropriate sciences are pursuing. It would be extraordinary if he had succeeded in completing the task which he undertook. It is also extraor- dinary to demand of any class of scholars that they shall say
" Cf . Tk4 Psychic Fdctors of CiviliMatUm, pp. t and vi.
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the final word upon all the inquiries which they suggest, or be denied appreciation. The work of Ward made an era in American sociology, and the fact will be admitted in the future even by men whose methods are very different from those which Ward proposed.
The animating conception of Ward's work is that dynamic sociology must be the application of all available forces, physi- cal, industrial, spiritual,®^ to the attainment of rational social ends. It may be said that this is a platitude. On the contrary, compared with certain very firmly intrenched views of society, it is practically a paradox. For instance, Gumplowicz' Grundriss der Sociologie appeared two years later than Dynamic Sociology. In the chapter on class structure and the aristocratic order (p. 133) the author browbeats those bold democrats who presume to question the desirability of priests and lords. While he very properly shows that each of these classes corresponds to a social need, and that the merit of each is to be determined by its discharge of the indicated function, he adds : " Besides, sociology must refrain from all such criti- cism of nature. For sociology only the facts and their con- formity to laws have an interest." According to him the question, "Could things not be different and better?'* is not permissible from the sociological standpoint, for "social phe- nomena follow necessarily from the nature of men and from the nature of their relationships." In other words, Gumplowicz assumes that what is is nature.** Ward assumes that what is may be nature partially realized, and that the destiny of nature is to realize itself completely through action by its conscious parts upon its unconscious parts. This "artificial progress" will not nullify nature, but will make potential nature actual.**
"Of course, this use of popular teims does not imply. that Ward classifies social forces under these categories.
"It is gratifying to add that Gumplowicz has given Ward credit for his conversion from the view quoted (Die Zeit, August 20, 1904; translated in American Journal of Sociology, Vol. X, p. 643).
" " It is not merely what we are born as, or what the world begins with, that comes of itself. The most ordinary conception of growth involves
1
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY ^
The antithesis between Ward and sociologists like Gumplo- wicz, or even Spencer, appears in his belief that mind can work natural laws to more splendid demonstration of the laws. He therefore demands more knowledge of all the laws con- cerned. " The attitude of man toward nature should be two- fold : first, that of a student ; second, that of a master." •* In a word, Ward's fundamental proposition is : We must learn the quality and modes of action of the efficient social forces. Con- ceding rootn for debate about details of applicaticHi and con- clusion. Ward's central idea remains unassailable.
D. Assumption of psychological universals, — All thinking strives toward a final* stage in which the object may be repre- sented, not as it seems to any partial perception, but as it is in reality, or, as some of the psychologists say, " as it would look to an omniscient mind." Many sociologists have been so eager for their science to reach this degree of maturity that they have entertained the idea of a method capable of conducting directly to the desired end. Zeal for discovery of universals has prompted some of the best work, and it has betrayed into some of the most serious mistakes, in sociology. Nothing more sharply distinguishes the sociologists, as a class, from the specialists whose fragmentary programs promise nothing and propose nothing comprehensive, than the explicit aim of soci- ology to reach knowledge which shall have a setting for all details of fact about human associations, in a complete view of human associations as a whole. Demand for the universal is thus the very reason for the existence of sociology, and it is perhaps small wonder that men who are able keenly to feel the demand are allured by the notion of a method peculiarly related to the supply.
It is in this connection that it is most just to speak of the fourth writer, whom Barth dismisses with a brief reference
maturity, and the tenn Nature, in Greek and Latin, as in English, can indicate not only what we are born as, but what we are bom for, our true or real or complete nature." (Bosanquet, Philosophical Theory of the State, p. 130.)
** Dynamic Sociology, Vol. II, p. 11.
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in his group of '^ the dualistic sociologists." All that has been said above about the inappropriateness of the phrase is appli- cable to Professor Giddings. It would be superfluous to volunteer any additional disclaimers in his behalf. He is a monist and a dualist in precisely the same sense in which all modem thinkers are both and neither.
Professor Giddings deserves recognition for earnest cham- pionship of an element in method without which the other elements are abortive. His mistake, however, seems to ccmsist in the assumption that the intellectual end toward which all valid methods converge may be anticipated and made a means for securing the end. The cabalistic sign of this potent method is the phr^e " subjective interpretation." ^ This phrase hiay mean in practice either of two things : First, the reading of the interpreter's personal equation into the thing in question.** In this case it deserves no further notice. Second, an image of the thing as it is in its essence, in all its qualities and dimen- sions and relations. In this case "subjective interpretation" is without question the goal to be reached, but it ought to be equally self-evident that it cannot meanwhile be the method by which it is reached.
Sociology, as it appears in its confused literature up to date, is one in the implicit or explicit purpose to make out the details of relationships involved in human associations, and to recon- struct them in thought in such a way that each element will be credited with its true value within the whole. This is the
'^Principles of Sociology, pp. ii and 36.
"Mr. Philip H. Fogd has challenged this assertion, and has called it unfair to Professor Giddings (American Journal of Sociology, Vol. X, pp. 370, 371). I must, however, allow the proposition to stand as it was originally published (ibid., Vol. V, p. 639). I still think that at that time Professor Giddings was not sufficiently guarded against mistaking his own subjectivity for objective reality. He had so much of the courage of his convictions that he did not pay enough respect to the necessity of generalizing convictions. The claim might be illustrated, if necessary, by citations from the chapter on " The Mind of the Many," in Democracy and Empire, pp. 48-57. I must add, how- ever, that I discover no traces of the objectionable tendency in Inductive . Sociology.
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psychological universal. But there is no plenary indulgence in favor of sociology to dispense with the purgatory of all neces- sary logical stages between the specific and the universal. Sociology has escaped the provincialism of less ambitious social sciences in proportion as it has kept ultimate tmiversals in view. Hypothetical universals serve the same uses and lend them- selves to the same abuses in sociology as elsewhere. Nothing is added to their authority by the title " subjective interpreta- tion." The phrase is merely a name for the same reccMistruct- ive synthesis which every philosopher, from the Sophists down, has implicitly aimed to achieve. It stands for the mind's effort to represent details of a whole in their adjustments to each other within the whole. Mental organization of parts into wholes, or analysis of wholes into parts, is a constant reaction between the objective and the subjective.*^ The his- tory of thought teems with examples of the dangers of giving excessive credit to the subjective element. It usually results in reading into objective reality undue proportions of premature impression about reality. All formation of concepts is " sub- jective interpretation." All descriptive analysis, all classifica- tion, all explanation is " subjective interpretation " in the only sense admissible in science.*® It cannot be anything else. The fault of "subjective interpretation" as an arbiter of method is that it is likely to be too little the mind's organization of ele- ments observed in the object. It will consequently be too much the mind's fiction stimulated by certain impressions received from the object, but completed by extraneous material. The report of the object proves, then, to have in it relatively too little of the object and relatively too much of the subject. This danger is inevitable in the long process of deriving universals. It may be averted only by curbing the impertinences of the subjective presumption.
Sociology is essentially an effort to find more adequate
" The terms are at this point relative to the consciousness of the individual organizer.
"Viz., the second above, mediated by progressive correction of the first.
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categories with which to conceptualize social details, and to organize the contents of these categories into a universal con- ception. It is dangerous, however, to think anything in cate- gories which cannot be observed, but have to be imputed. In applying such categories we are likely to interpret by deduction from unauthorized impressions that fill the mind in the absence of adequate analysis of the object.
The whole argument of this syllabus is virtually upon the problem here presented. As the essentials involved will be dis- cussed in various relations, further detail may for the present be postponed.
E. The desirable combination of methods,^ — It may be said, in general, that men who have tried to explain social life have tended to vibrate between two extremes. On the one hand, they have exaggerated fragments, sections, phases, abstractions, disjecta membra, of human activities and condi- tions, and have neglected the containing whole ; *^ or they have adopted a presumption rjf the whole which took away their freedom so to investigate the parts that more appropriate con- ceptions of the whole might result. Our thought about human affairs has consequently been a farrago of snap- judgments, partial formulations, and promotions of narrow generalizations to the rank of universals. In order that worthy beginnings of societary science might be made, there must needs have been developed a sense, first of societary continuity, second of societary integrity ; i. e., of societary wholeness, both consecu- tive and contemporary. More especially this conception makes of human association a whole, developing without break of
** Among recent contributions to this subject the following desenre special notice : Bosanquet, " Relation of Sociology to Philosophy," Mind, January, 1898 ; Caldwell, " Philosophy and the Newer Sociology," Contemporary Review, September, 1898; Baldwin (F. S.), "Present Position of Sociology," Popular Science Monthly, October, 1899; Giddings, "Exact Methods in Sociology," Popular Science Monthly, December, 1899 ; Branford, " The Origin and Use of the Word ' Sociology,' " American Journal of Sociology, Vol. IX, p. 145.
^Vide De Greef, on the equal tendency of industrial and academic spe- cialization to narrow the mind and the man (Les lois sociologiques, p. 14, et passim).
I
THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY 91
continuity from origins. It is a whole which exists at any given moment as a reciprocity between all its parts. It projects itself into the future in the form determined by the ratio of effectiveness between the elements and conditions that mold its character. This view requires a corresponding methodologi- cal conception. Such a conception involves the view that human association is a congruity, an integrity, a unity. Knowl- edge of such a reality accordingly implies comprehension of the parts, of the whole which they compose, and of the relation- ships by virtue of which parts and whole are one. This means that, however study of human affairs may be divided for con- venience, the division is only provisional and partial and tem- porary. This knowledge is not reached until that conceptual division has been resolved again into conceptual unification, in which part and whole are more accurately apprehended than before as phases of one.
The view to which our survey leads is, therefore, that we need a scheme of inquiry into societary fact which, as a scheme, will provide in form for all the phases of reality that the societary unity presents. Then the task of determining and expressing these various phases of reality imposes a net- work of problems. We may call them primarily, if we will, problems of anthropology, ethnology, history, politics, eco- nomics, or whatever. That is, we may group certain classes of problems, and call the processes and results in connection with them "sciences." In fact, however, each of these prob- lems, or groups of problems, or "sciences," sooner or later involves all the rest. Our hierarchy of sciences then proves to be, like the unity which it tries to interpret, one instead of many. The social sciences are merely methodological divi- sions of societary science in general.
In different parts of the world, authorities of various sorts have created more or less arbitrary classifications of the social sciences. This occurs chiefly in the universities. It would not require a long argument to show that at best these divisions are likely to become obstructive, in spite of their adoption for
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scientific and academic convenience. Whether inquiry into the principles of human association be conducted by use of a tradi- tional or an extemporized division of labor, it is all virtually one search into one reality. The divisions exist in our minds, not in the object. The aim of science is to comprehend these apparent diversities as members of the unity of which they are aspects.
There should be a name to cover all study, of whatever sort, which contributes to knowledge of the societary reality, or associated human life, just as the name "biology" desig- nates no specific field of research, but the whole realm of inquiry into the conditions and processes of vegetable and animal life. It is theoretically of very slight importance in itself what name is chosen for that whole organon of knowl- edge about society. The tendency among sociologists, at least, seems to be toward reassertion of the judgment that the name " sociology " is, on the whole, most suitable and convenient.** This tendency is parallel with gravitation in use of the name " biology." The latter is now understood as the comprehensive term for the whole of vital, science. Similar use of the term " sociology " would, of course, give it a much broader applica- tion than belongs to it as the designation of a university chair, or of a specific division of social science. Every investigation of a phase of societary reality would in this sense be a chapter of sociology, just as vegetable and animal embryology, morphology, physiology, ecology, zoology, etc., are each and all chapters of biology. The persons now known as sociologists are no more sociologists in the proposed sense than the eth- nologists, historians, economists, political scientists, etc. In
^Thus Tarde: "S'il n'est pas vrai que les divenes sciences sociales doiyent se confondre d^sormais en une seule, qui serait la sociologie, il est certain qu'dles doivent toutes s*y plonger Tune apris Tautre, pour en soitir soit retremp^es et ra^eunies, soit glaciales et inanimees. Cela depend de la quality du bain " i,Les transformations du pouvoir, p. â–¼). Dietzel does not seem to regard " sociology " as worth serious notice, but by the term Socialwissenschaft he evidently means precisely what the term "sociology" connotes in this discussion. Vide Theoretische Socialokonomik, chap. i.
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parallel fashion there are no biologists today who are not more specifically botanists, physiologists, zoologists, neurolo- gists, etc.*^
In other words, the outcome of thought about men in association amounts to dawning perception that human asso- ciation is not a mere academic conventionality. It is the objective reality which is the setting for the ultimate human problem of the conduct of life. Knowledge of this reality depends upon organization of the results of a multitude of investigations, many of which have not yet been proposed, and few, if any, of which have been completed. Sociology then, in the large sense, or the organon of knowledge about human associations, is today a vast system of problems concerning the essential elements and correlations of htunan association. This being the case, all the ways and *means thus far devised for investigating human associations have their uses at the proper time and place, but it is evident that the conventional "sci- ences " are at best rudimentary means for advancing knowledge of association in general. There must be diminishing regard for the lines drawn by " sciences," and increasing attention to the direct import of problems.
For example, it has been said by Herbert Spencer, with prescience far in advance of his science, that " the question of questions for the politician should ever be: 'What type of social structure am I tending to produce?'"** There is no difference of opinion among social theorists as to the abstract desirability of knowledge about the relation of different scwis of acts to social structure. One at least of the large problems of social science is accordingly this : " How do different sorts of acts affect social structure ? " Now, there is no conventional academic " department " or social science to which such a prob- lem belongs. On the contrary, there is no department or science to which it does not belong. It is a real problem, just as truly as the question of the effect of electrolysis upon steel
^Vide above, pp. 4^, 43.
^Social Statics and Man vs. the State, Am. ed. of 1892, p. 312.
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construction is a real problem. The anthropologist, the psy- chologist, the ethnologist, the historian, the political econo- mist, the political scientist, and an indefinite number of sub- sidiary specialists, must necessarily co-operate in the solution of the problem.
Again, it is equally important to know what individual type any social arrangement tends to produce. In this case the same proposition holds. The concrete truth about the effect of human conduct is not the preserve of any abstract science. We might schedule in turn all the genera and species of problems that we encounter when we search for the meaning elements in society. They are threads in a tapestry. There can be no such thing as a self-sufficient science of the separate threads. The nieaning of the threads depends upon knowledge of the com- plete design of the whole fabric.
Accordingly, over and above the multitude of more con- crete sociological tasks for which a place is conceded without much opposition, there are two distinguishable procedures of a general character for which thorough and comprehensive societary science must provide. The former of these is the division of labor appropriate to that species of sociologist who may be called the methodologist. It is the task of making out and exhibiting in the most general way the forms and inter- relations of societary facts, and the consequent interdepend- encies of processes which undertake scientific formulation of these facts. The familiar De Greef schedule 6f societary activities may serve as an illustration of the beginning of this procedure. A classification of associations under the forms called for by Simmel's method would represent a much more advanced stage of the procedure. A classification according to the functional utilities of