Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/301

 THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF SOCIOLOGY 289

of human knowledge. It is the final interpreter of each and every lesser fact which may attract human attention. Since this process, from beginning to end, from component to completeness, in its forms and in its forces, in its origins, its variations, and its ten- dencies, is the subject-matter which sociology proposes to investi- gate, the relation of every other science to sociology is fixed, not by the dictum of any scientist, but by the relation which the subject-matter and the methods of other sciences bear to knowl- edge of the entire social process.

To make the point more precise, we may distinguish the work of sociology in turn from that of ethnology, of history, and of economics. Before passing to these specifications, or illustrations, we must provide for all necessary corrections of the personal equa- tion. We will not assume, whether to the advantage or the dis- advantage of either science, that any single man, still less a single fragment of his work, fairly represents the whole of his science. We will not even venture to assume that our use of the material to be cited for illustration gives all the credit due to the writer from which it is taken. His own views of the final correlation of that material with other subjects of knowledge may be quite unobjectionable. Our purpose is merely to illustrate the point that the same objective material may, in the form in which it appears in a given version of one of these sciences, have no interest for sociology whatever, or, on the other hand, it may be viewed in such relations as, at one and the same time, to furnish subject-matter for one of these sciences and also for sociology. To express the case from the point of view of desirability, as I see it, and of ultimate adjustment, as I predict it, there will presently be no apparently statical dualism or mul- tipleism between the subject-matter of the other human sciences and sociology. When every student of human life realizes that the reality which he tries to know is a one, not a many, each will regard the material of his immediate science, not as belonging to his science instead of belonging to another science, but as being to some extent the common material of several sciences, or at most as held in trusteeship by his science for its final use in the com- plete science.