Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/772

 756 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

without waiving the right to construct a new philosophy, if he can, is also confronted with the task of developing a special science.

If there is any social process that fulfils these conditions, what is it? How can it be identified so as to become the object of our attention? An answer to this question that is likely to offer itself to the mind is, that the social process is social evolution, and that the special social sciences are related to sociology some- what as the special sciences that treat of organic life are related to the study of biological evolution, which has contributed so much to the advancement of these sciences, but which itself still lacks so much of completeness and so urgently invites research. Whether this be the final answer to our query or not, the idea of social evolution is so important and interesting as to call for remark at this point, and, for the moment at least, we may use the phrase "social process" as equivalent to social evolution.

The " growth " 19 of a society does not mean mere increase in population, any more than the " growing up " of a child to man- hood is mere increase in bulk into a two-hundred-pound infant, and societies are always growing, though their growth is not always progress. There is an onward and upward sweep in human affairs, but there are also retrograde movements. There are not only negative failure and lack, there are also positive harm and ruin included in the social process, and to be explained by knowl- edge of the principles of social causation. If the sociologist studies the processes in which human lives affect other human lives, he must recognize that men affect each other for evil as well as good. Association includes war and hate as well as love and beneficence. And the sociologist must study the whole process as it is, good and bad together. The immigrant who brought from a Moravian home a pietistic and refined conscience, and, settling in the slums of an American city, became depraved, exhibits a social phenomenon as really as another immigrant on whom a better phase of our civilization has produced an opposite effect. The depraving forces were all present in the complex

" Possibly we might receive a suggestion from the biologists' distinction between " growth " in mass and " development " in organization.