Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/297

 THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF SOCIOLOGY 285

patiently one type of men studies plants, and another reptiles, and another fishes, and another birds, and another beasts, and so on, neither one nor all of them could go much beyond advertising the need of a biological science which did not exist. In order that dilettantish natural history might pass over into positive biology, it was necessary that all observation of living nature should submit to control by an antecedent conception of organic matter and laws of the variation of its phenomena. In a word, whatever the chronological order of occurrence of the ideas, all the concrete and special knowledge that goes to make up our present sciences has been unified at last around some central con- ception of subject-matter and appropriate method. We may express the fact for our present purposes in the formula : Physics is the science of matter in its molar and molecular processes; chemistry is the science of matter in its atomic processes ; biology is the science of matter in its organic processes. In each case the comprehensive science has the task of organizing details which may already have been studied separately by several varieties of scholars. The same logical methods which have arrived at these generalizations make irresistibly toward the conviction that coherence and unity of knowledge about human experience demand a science of men in their associational processes. Many of these processes have long been studied in detail, but study of them in their correlations is, as in the case of chemical and vital processes, the work of a distinct order of science, with a peculiar object of attention. To the range of generalization which the needed general science comprehends in the present case the men who have most felt the need apply the name sociology.

Without referring to details which might further guard this summary comparison, our present interest is in the fact to be illustrated in the case of sociology. The phenomena presented by human beings have been studied in ways which are on the same logical plane with the treatment of organic phenomena by the obsolete types of "natural history." Not to mention the lesser social sciences, conventional history and economics and ethics, as represented by still extant types of thinkers, are sometimes as fragmentary and unvital and uncentered as a " science " of garden