Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/118

 106 only in unity. No fraction of knowledge is as important as the next larger synthesis of that knowledge with other knowledge. No constituent of knowledge kept separate and isolated from other knowledge can be as valuable to the race as it becomes when combined with related knowledge. The contrary is admittedly often the case in a sense with individuals. For the largest social purposes there must go side by side in constructive scholarship the process of abstraction and the process of correlation. To make the most of knowledge it is necessary to perform two processes, either deliberately or unconsciously,—first, the process of studying the particular subject as though it were the one object of interest upon which the energies of the human mind ought to concentrate; second, the process of locating that subject in its proper relations with the whole body of knowledge of which it is a fragment. Minute study of abstracted specialities is no more important than the subsequent or possibly prior inquiry. How does the specialty fit into the whole complex of knowledge that fills the territory of human interests?

A scholar whose department is logically somewhat distant from sociology, recently made this very sagacious remark: "A couple of centuries ago men's thoughts were fairly expressed by Pope's aphorism 'The proper study of mankind is man.' Meanwhile our perspective has so shifted that our generation says 'The proper study of man is mankind.'" The point of view of modern sociology could hardly have been more ingeniously indicated. Man the individual, man the genus homo is not the last term in the equation of visible life. Mankind, the permutation of men, the associations of men, in which there is reciprocal modification of the association by its components, and of the components by the association—men in social reciprocity, this is the last and highest stage of experience which our observation discovers, and this consummate reality of associated human life, in which the career of individuals is made or marred, forms the setting, to interpret and to be interpreted by all the included particulars which special knowledge accumulates.

The all-inclusive fact of association in groups or societies of various grades, from the family up to the race, presents the most complex forms of the human life problem. What are the essentials and what are the accidents of the associated or societary condition? What