Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/770

 754 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

The fact that even among those who have given the subject careful heed there is no clear and generally accepted notion as to what is the province of sociology, may be due to this, that the attempt has been to define a kind or aspect of accomplished facts instead of a kind of processes. Confusion would result among the material sciences if they should try to divide things among them. They would literally be reduced to fighting over the same bone. The biologist would, with indisputable right, claim every bone ; but so also would the physicist claim it as a thing of hard- ness, impenetrability, and weight; and, with a claim equal to either, the chemist also, as so much lime. But between the three processes or kinds of action of which the bone is an expression growth for the biologist, gravity for the physicist, and atomic affinity for the chemist there is no confusion ; and may not the difficulty as to just what is the province of sociology disappear as we adopt the true view, that here as there the objects of scientific study are processes ?

Every science or for us it suffices to say, every science of life has its static and dynamic side. That is, it describes what it finds existent, sustained ; and it also describes the processes by which all that is arose and is sustained. In other phrase, it describes beings, and aims to understand their being and their becoming ; or, seeing what is, it asks how, that which is become, continues, and is transformed. In the static, the extant, the results of many processes and the problems of many sciences exist together in confusion; by distinguishing the processes, intelligi- bility and order emerge. The search for things rather than move- ments, groups and institutions rather than interactions, national societies rather than the foci of association, has baffled defini- tion and confused analysis. Society must be both defined and analyzed, and it is society as a process, or as persons who carry on a process, that can be defined; and it is when the congeries of social phenomena is conceived in terms of process that it can be analyzed. The fundamental and apocalyptic analysis will be an analysis into the kinds of activity of which it is composed.

The static phenomena pertaining to society were studied be- fore sociology came into existence, and will continue to be studied