Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/107

 THE FOUNDERS OF SOCIOLOGY 95

books on sociology. To live at all is to have social experience. The child who can write his name has of necessity amassed an impressive quantity of social experience. The woman who spends a few shillings in a grocer's shop in doing so pronounces a whole series of sociological judgments.

The commonest of all sociological phenomena is that which our limited vocabulary opposes to society the individual. The mind of the individual is built up of the debris of past social systems. Whoever studies the working of the human mind and its history is either studying sociology or preparing himself for its study. Psychology is a part of sociology in its widest sense. There may be implicit a theory of society, and therefore a sys- tem of sociology, in the briefest conversation, in a phrase, even in a word. You are not only talking sociology, you are even indicating the presence in your mind of far-reaching conceptions of social relationships, when you use ethical words like " duty," "justice," "honor," "vice;" or juristic and political words like " contract," " property," " taxes," " crime ; " or economic words like " profits," " rent," " wages," " interest," " capital ; " or domes- tic and commonplace words like "manners," "home," "luck," or religious words like "oath," "sacred," "sin," "sacrament," " righteousness."

What is a newspaper but a page of a sociological note-book, with its random observations and its lack of interpretative insight ? A volume of the Illustrated London News is a museum of sociology, as miscellaneous in its arrangement as if it belonged to the palmy days of South Kensington. The journalists and the novelists are the field-naturalists of sociology; only they have not yet found their Linnaeus.

A novel, when it is not a monument of aesthetic imbecility, is a dramatic presentation of chance observations in sociology and psychology. The most impressive contribution made to descrip- tive sociology in the nineteenth century was surely the Rougon- Macquart series of Zola, though doubtless there are many who in the name of scientific comprehensiveness would claim that distinction for the collected works of Balzac. The preface to Balzac's La Maison du chat qui pelote is a classic document in the