Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/295

 THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF SOCIOLOGY 283

former kind of knowledge is description, narrative, story, tradi- tion, that does not rise to the generality of science. The latter kind of knowledge may be organized into science of a certain order of generality. This has occurred, schematically at least, in the case of the accepted social sciences ethnology, history, economics, etc. The sociologists are attempting to develop a general science, which will have relations to the special social sciences analogous with the relations of general physics to the special physical sciences, on the one hand, and to the various physical technologies on the other ; or analogous with the relations of general chemistry to subdivisions of chemistry; or the relations of general biology to subordinate sections of biology.

Comparisons of this sort are so loose that they might easily prejudice the case under discussion. They are merely illustra- tions, necessarily inexact, but presenting certain instructive paral- lels. Let us suppose that, at a certain stage in the development of the science of physics, investigators had acquired considerable amounts of knowledge about groups of physical phenomena determined by relatively superficial marks. Let us suppose that one type of physicists had specialized upon gravitation, with the least possible attention to all other phases of physical phenomena. Suppose another type had in the same way confined attention to the phenomena of light; another, to those of magnetism; etc. Suppose that in each case the knowledge gained by such abstrac- tion had been carefully systematized. This whole body of knowl- edge would doubtless have had a certain value. Obviously that value would have been narrowly limited, however, because such arbitrary isolation of things that are essentially related is possible only so long as insight into the real facts is rudimentary. Modern physics could not come into existence until, by some means or other, students of these things had learned to entertain the idea of the unity of their phenomena, resting in an underlying unity of substance manifesting the phenomena. That is, there could be only superficial arrangements of amateurish observation, not respectable science, until a unifying conception gave coherence to the details observed. Thus the conception of matter, and of the molar and molecular processes of matter, might have arisen after