Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/307

 THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF SOCIOLOGY 295

Happily it is impossible for the most atomistically minded historiographer utterly to overlook the pointings of each event or situation toward connections with other events and situations. Even a list of topics like the one we have cited at random testifies of this necessity. " Results," " state," " growth," " policy," " in- troduction," " maintenance," " transitional," are all terms of rela- tionship. Moreover, the relationships implied are not merely those of nearness in time or space, nor of series. They are relationships of working-with, of process. This process may be contemplated merely within an arbitrarily restricted area; e. g., causes and effects so far as they appear in contrasts between the before and the after of relations of classes, of economic systems, of constitutional principles, of legal enactments, of social customs, of religious conventions in a certain population. In this case there is rudimentary, but narrowly restricted, recognition that specific knowledge gets its value by correlation with other knowledge. The interest of the historian converges toward that of the sociolo- gist in the precise degree in which the former desires to advance from knowledge of occurrences as such, not merely to their imme- diate correlations, but to their last discoverable meanings as indexes of the whole process of social evolution. At one extreme is sheer interest in bare details. At the other extreme is interest that rates everything short of dynamic interpretation of the details as mere preliminary.

The same distinction may be stated in terms of discrimination between the economic and the sociological interest. Again, it should be urged with all emphasis that every use of words which implies an exclusive division of subject-matter among the social sciences is merely a convenient concession to a condition which the progress of science should at least mitigate. As we have said above, from the sociological view-point different workers in the social sciences are not working on different kinds of material. They are merely carrying on different divisions of labor upon one material. That material is human experience in general. The total purpose of social science, up to the point where it ceases to be mere knowledge and begins to pass over into power, is to dis- cover the meanings of human experience. Our present illustration