Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/160

 148 control that which is to be ; the first speaks in the indicative mood, the second in the imperative.

If I have believed it necessary to insist upon this distinction between art and science, it is because the distinction once made wonderfully simplifies the task which I have undertaken. Economic science, according to this distinction, is the study of the facts pertaining to the production, the circulation, the distribution and the consumption of wealth, and also of the laws which emerge from these facts. Economic art, on the other hand, is a body of precepts relating to a possible better form of organizing these different phenomena. Political economy reaches its completion only in combination of these two orders of research.

Sociology, on the other hand, understood not in the popular sense but in the acceptation fixed by the usage of its most eminent exponents, does not present this duality. Sociology is a science only, the general science of societies. It does not wish to be an art, since researches of the scientific order are enough to occupy the sociologists; and practical applications, to be fruitful, must be reserved until later. It is true that, even thus limited, the field open to the sociologist's efforts remains immense.

That which the sociologist has to study is not merely, as in the case of the economist, the facts and the laws pertaining to wealth; it is the totality of societary phenomena. The sociologist must pass in review all societies and all the classes of facts