Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/460

448 interests realized by association, to be the subject-matter of the specific historical and material sciences. This "form" in question is reciprocal action, association. We are to study the special forms of subordination, concurrence, imitation, opposition, division of labor, found in the various types of social groups. But we must bear in mind that phenomena are not social merely because they are parallel, nor do similarities and regularities established by statistics belong to our science if each has an individual cause. Not what takes place iti society but what takes by society is the field of sociology.

The criticism which Berthelot applies to Tarde above might also be applied to the criterion for social facts propounded by Durkheim. According to the latter a social fact comprises every kind of action, whether fixed in definite law or not, which is capable of exercising an external constraint upon the individual, or it may be otherwise defined as one which is general throughout a given society and has a proper existence of its own, independent of its individual manifestations. Language, laws both statute and moral, religious beliefs, financial systems impose themselves upon the individual. They are general because collective (i. e., obligatory) and not vice versa. A collective sentiment which flashes into life in an assembly is something quite other than the common element of all the individual sentiments. It is a product of the common life.

M. Durkheim then goes on to an elaborate and comprehensive exposition of the methods to be employed by sociology. These methods include—

(1) Rules relating to observation of social facts. These rules are: (a) consider social facts as things. Bacon's "idols" all find their counterparts in social science at present. Comte, with his law of the historical development of humanity, Spencer, with his idea of cooperation, spontaneous or imposed, as the essential characteristic of society, make preconceived theories