Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/767

 SOCIOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION LINES 751

gists from organizations and institutions to the processes of inter- action that constitute the life of society.

There is a doctrine among philosophers that all our final knowledge of anything, living or not, is a knowledge of processes. They tell us that wherever there is a thing there is an activity of which the thing is the continuous result; and, if the thing is unchanging, that is because the activity is constant. Animal life is a highly complex process, comprising many subordinate pro- cesses : the beating heart, the circulating blood, the heaving lungs, peristalsis, osmosis, secretion, and the rest a continual build- ing up and tearing down of tissues of many kinds. Plant life is also a process, less complex and less obvious save to the botanist In a dead animal or a log much of the activity has ceased, yet some still goes on. The gradual process of decay is not the only activity present in the log ; decay, is rather the disturbance of the activities that are present in the sound timber. In the sound wood hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen hold each other in a vigorous embrace, and if that embrace were loosened for an instant, the result we call wood would disappear. Moreover, the united hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen are in constant motion. It is when their union is violently broken down by enzymes, and the remnants are attacked by the avid oxygen, that decay takes place and log and wood cease. The very soil into which it crumbles is to be understood only in terms of process. It is when molecules are liberated from encumbrance by solution or fusion 15 that is, when the activities that constitute one kind of matter are not interrupted by those that constitute some other kind that we get crystals. The absolute regularity and constancy of the process appears in absolutely regular shapes. The centers of activity push and pull each other just alike, and so hold each other fast in ranks and files. These centers of activity are the atoms; and physicists now tell us that atoms are sys- tems of interacting electrons, and that electrons are vortices. 16

u In fusion communicated motion appears so to reinforce the characteristic motion of molecules that they tear themselves free, and solution may well be due to a relation between the vibrations in the body dissolved and the vibrations in the solvent.

" This clause is inserted in deference to the recent discoveries in radio-