Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/777

 SOCIOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION LINES 761

Many persons, including Comte himself, have identified the dynamic conception of society only with the idea of society's evo- lution and change. The dynamic conception of society as here set forth has as much to do with permanence as with change. It has been said that even an unchanging stone can be conceived in terms of process, and certainly the most established social institution can be so conceived. An institution considered as established and per- manent for instance, the courts or the school system would be called a static phenomenon by those who contrast the static with the dynamic, and identify dynamic phenomena only with change. But in reality such an institution is as really a dynamic phenomenon when thoroughly established as when it was in the act of coming into existence or is undergoing transformation. When thoroughly established, and as they say static, it has become a set of relatively constant and regular social activities.

Besides past evolution, then, the social process includes also contemporaneous social activity and causation. The former ex- plains the difference between historic periods ; the latter explains the difference between social classes. It is often the case that two families living in the same city ward, because of different opera- tion of social causes, are separated by a gulf as wide as that between historic centuries. The differences are other than those between historic periods, but they are as real and as great. Some, identifying sociology with study of social evolution, care only for investigations of the past and the primitive, and center their attention chiefly on that which they recognize as good in the making. Others, intent on the problems of today, are impa- tient of such studies of the bygone and the primitive, and center their attention on the present, and often chiefly on what they recognize as present evil, and the question how it comes to miss the better that is so near it. To restrict the scope of sociology in either way is wrong by being only partly right. The social process is one. The stream of the social past debouches in the swirling present. The principles in operation are alike in both. To discover these principles is the aim of sociology. Once dis- covered, they may be applied to the solution of present problems, or to the construction of a scientific history.