Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/368

356 realization of the self. Sociology has to consider the adjustment of the tension between man's social environment and his individual welfare. All the shiftings, surgings, and upheavals of society arise from the strained relations between the individual and the social organization through which the individual attempts to realize his life. Sociology seizes at once upon social organization as a means of personal development. The ultimate social standard is found in the individual; social organization must always be considered as a means of self-realization. Sociology thus furnishes a means which pedagogy must recognize, while pedagogy furnishes to sociology the laws of individual development by which sociology must regulate itself. It thus appears that pedagogy has the broader field, in that it considers man in relation to his whole environment, but on the other hand it must be observed that sociology takes into account all instrumentalities of education as a part and function of the social structure. Hence the distinction is not in the breadth of subject-matter, but in the point of emphasis. While pedagogy considers how the individual lives in and through the entire thought and life of his environment, sociology considers the best organization of social agencies to further the foregoing life process. On the one hand sociology seeks the best social structure through which pedagogic theories may realize themselves, and on the other it investigates one realm of the environment through which the individual is educated. In fact, as W. T. Harris has said, "The evolution of civilization is the key to education in all its varieties and phases, as found in family, civil society, state and church, as well as school."

The foregoing suggests a more immediate connection between the two subjects, in the fact that sociology deals with the subjective side of the individual as externalized in institutions—with the objective pyschology of the individual which is the substantial foundation to the subject of pedagogy. Man projects the many sides of his life into the form of institutions in order to a more varied and complete living. For instance, man has the desire and the capacity to protect himself from his fellow man, but in