Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/299

 THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF SOCIOLOGY 287

peculiar section of knowledge as though it outranked every other kind of knowledge. Not group provincialisms, however, but the reality of objective relations, must determine at last, whether a selected portion of knowledge is relatively a fragment or a whole, relatively insignificant or important. No incident, phase, machinery, institution, product, stage, or program of human life, is central enough to clothe knowledge of it with more than the rank of a tributary science. The process that is taking place among men, through the ages and across the ages, is the largest whole of which men can have positive knowledge. This whole consequently fixes the goal of complete science of human life. No less than this whole is contemplated by the sociologist as his aim. He necessarily represents a desired generalization of knowledge which is farther than any other scientific program from actual or probable completion. Sociology thus defined is, and must remain, more a determining point of view than a finished body of knowl- edge. At the same time, and by virtue of both these sides of its case, sociology exposes the relativity and the partialness of any body of knowledge which comprehends less than the full sweep of the social process. Whatever be the appraisal of the fractional sciences in the subjective estimate of their promoters, the objec- tive importance of each of them is measured by the kind and amount of tribute it can bring to knowledge of the human process as a whole.

These conceptions have been expressed in such general terms that repetition in less abstract form may not be superfluous. Wher- ever two or more human beings are within each other's ken, there is set up between them action and reaction, exchange of influence of some sort or other. That influence, on the one hand, molds the individuals concerned, tending to make, unmake, remake them without end; and, on the other hand, it composes those indi- viduals into more or less rigid group-relationships, perhaps after having decomposed previous relationships to another group. This reciprocating process, growing infinitely complex as the circle of association widens, and as the type of individual becomes more and more evolved including besides its form, the content of the process, first in the evolving objective conditions within which the