Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/209

Rh connotes anything from which I would dissent with respect to the necessary relation between descriptive data and sociological treatment of the data. The collected facts are equal in importance to Professor Ward and myself. I prefer to provide for a distinct division or department of the sociological process, that department, namely, which is devoted to the collection and description of facts, with such classification as is possible by the use of superficial traits. The material so arranged is then the lawful booty of interpretation—first static, then dynamic.

As already remarked, this is, of course, a methodological division, or distinction of process, not a division of subject-matter. The collected facts, to be interpreted in their static and dynamic relations, pertain to both past and present. Thinking now of the material of general sociology in the widest sense, the pertinent facts to be included in the category "descriptive sociology" will consist of all obtainable significant particulars about the phenomena which human associations present for interpretation. These phenomena are largely the subject-matter of special social sciences, and observations of these have been and perhaps always will be made chiefly by persons who do not proceed to the last syntheses of sociology. This fact does not constitute a reason why the initial processes, and the sciences to which they are immediately tributary, should not be grouped together for the purpose with which we are now concerned, under the general designation descriptive sociology. This grouping serves to make and keep clear the relation of these preliminary processes and results to the larger synthesis and interpretation which statical and dynamic sociology propose. I repeat, that agreement on this point need not affect the question in hand as to the relations of statical and dynamic sociology.

Professor Ward's views should be stated more fully before the argument goes farther. He continues:

Social dynamics (according to Comte) studies the laws of succession, while social statics seeks those of coexistence; or the former furnishes the theory of progress, the latter of order. Again (pp. 207-8): All considerations of structure and function are static. Merely