Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/771

 SOCIOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION LINES 755

if no special science of sociology should be developed. Economic, political, juridical, linguistic, and religious institutions can be described without the existence of a special science to correspond to the name of sociology. But after this has been admitted, the question remains to be answered whether there does not exist a kind of processes which are not exclusively economic or political or religious, the results of which appear not in any single class of human institutions, but in them all; and requiring for its investigation a special science which is neither economics nor politics, nor any previously existing discipline, but sociology. If such processes exist, the results of their study might at length be taken up into the special social sciences to aid in the explana- tion of particular facts, as the results of pure geometry are taken up into the explanation of the particular facts of astronomy and physics. That would not make sociology any less a special science than geometry. The question is : Are there any kinds of social activity requiring investigation that is not limited by the horizon of any special social science? If such activities exist, then there is need of a special science of sociology.

Now, there is no difficulty in seeing that there are forces, factors, and processes that are active in producing and shaping social phenomena, and the effects which are not confined to the field of any one of the special social sciences. It seems not too much to say that all the processes of nature and human nature are actively shaping phenomena in the field of every social science ; so that general sociology, if it is to be a study of the processes which shape social phenomena not of one sort, but of all sorts, and which are adequately traced by no one social science, must be a general philosophy ; an attempt to account for human experi- ence in the light of all science, synthesizing the results of all sciences by referring all discovered processes to their effect upon man. This is a possible view of the sociologist's task. But is there not a kind of processes which not only have social effects all natural processes do that but also have a social origin and essence, which are not comprehended within the sphere of atten- tion of any of the older sciences, but call for a new adjustment of attention? If these conditions are fulfilled, the sociologist,