Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/119

 Rh limitations does it fix to human accomplishments? What aids does it furnish to human endeavors? What taslcs does it impose, what aims does it suggest and what means and methods does it stipulate for the combination of human effort ? These are not questions invented in the seclusion of scholars' libraries. They are propounded by the world's busiest laborers and by its idlest shirkers alike. They are questions that propound themselves so soon as the objective fact of society presents itself to men's perceptions.

Every science throws its particular light upon some phase of the comprehensive societary problem. The physical sciences, first and foremost, analyze the external material conditions to which societies as well as individuals must accommodate themselves. The biological sciences deal at last with the vital factors which determine the individual type, and thus indirectly much of the social structure. The psychical sciences, both historical and contemporary, control another order of phenomena proceeding primarily from individuals, but combined at last into phenomena that have societary importance. Lastly, the social sciences divide up the phenomena of associated activity and interpret societary institutions and processes, domestic, economic, artistic, educational, ethical, religious, juridical and political. Each and all of these departments of knowledge puts under the microscope a certain section of reality abstracted from the vast sum of reality in which the movements of human society preserve their orbit, and then each tries more or less directly to correlate these details with the whole. The emergence of a new attempt to deal with the phenomena of society, and the application of a new name, Sociology, to this attempt, means, in the simplest words, that the growing dissatisfaction of scholars in all the branches of social science about the impotent isolation of the divisions of social science from each other has at last found effective expression in the differentiation of class of men calling themselves sociologists, who are offering themselves as the missing links to bind these disjecta membra together. It is sufficient for the present purpose to point out that sociology undertakes the work of organizing, and focalizing upon the tasks of living men, the distinct divisions of knowledge which may be and have been cultivated too independently and consequently too unproductively.