Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/760

744 tion for the study of sociology. This knowledge needs to be systematized and specialized, and directed to the definite end. The student needs to know just what he is pursuing it for. There is no more vicious educational practice, and scarcely any more common one, than that of keeping the student in the dark as to the end and purpose of his work. It breeds indifference, discouragement and despair. Therefore, while it would be fruitless to attempt to teach the principles of sociology before the student was put in possession of the facts from which those principles are derived, it is of the utmost importance to inform him as early as he is likely to understand what it means, that there is a great general science of society toward which all this is leading, and constantly to keep him imbued with the idea of an ultimate utility beyond the mere satisfaction of the desire to know facts.

Looking over this great field with the eye of reason, we are able to grasp its general import; and first of all, it is profitable to note that the facts that make up the data of sociology constitute so many varying classes of phenomena. That is to say, they are the manifestations of the qualities or properties of the multitudinous units of society or individual men. These differ at different times and places and constitute a complex manifold or multiple. There are distinct individualities in all the aggregates, from the ultimate units themselves upward through all their combinations into aggregates of higher orders. The study of such a varying manifold, however viewed, is essentially in the nature of history, and therefore the approaches to sociological study are all primarily historical. Moreover this history conforms in all essential respects to the character of the phenomena which are currently described by the term natural history.

Now this natural history of society readily subdivides into two groups, according to whether we study man himself in his social aspect, or his achievements. The first of these groups is anthropology in its proper sense, a sense considerably more restricted than that in which the term is commonly used. It would, for example, rigidly applied, exclude technology and archæology, but this is less important to our present purpose.