Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/305

Rh with other facts is concealed. On the other hand, every fact in human experience has a value of its own as an index of the social process that emerges in part in the fact. In so far as the historian hunts down facts for the purpose of finding the social process revealed in the facts, his interest is identical with that of the sociologist. The difference between them is again merely a difference of greater or less attention to different steps of one and the same approach to knowledge of the social reality. We might imitate a verbal distinction familiar in a related field, and say that as ethnography is to ethnology, so is historiography to historiology. I would by no means concede that the subject-matter of sociology is confined to the past. It is still more concerned with interpretation of the social process in the present. This term "historiology" is suggested as a synonym for one segment of the arc of sociology, and merely as a temporary expedient in this particular part of the argument. To point the contrast between mere discovery of details of past experience, and the work that the sociologists want to do, we may fairly call the former historiography and the latter historiology.

The real progress of the historians toward promotion of science is not in the line of which many of them have recently grown so proud. History does not become more scientific by shifting its attention from relatively insignificant kings and soldiers to equally insignificant common folks. History becomes scientific in proportion as it advances from knowledge of details toward reconstruction of the whole in which the details have their place. The sociologists have entered the field of social science with a plea for a fair share of attention to that correlation of knowledge, notorious neglect of which has thus far been the paradox of our era of "inductive science."

Recurring to the titles from Stubbs, we may add that investigation of such details may, and indeed must, proceed in the first instance with severe disregard of collateral details. The test of historical work, however, is not where it begins, but where it ends. It is a misconception of fact and a misuse of terms to speak of any