Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/778

 762 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

For the discovery of these principles, the study of the past and of the present have each some advantages that the other lacks. Our knowledge of the present is incomparably more complete than that which we can have of any past epoch. And our knowl- edge of the social movements in which we participate is more intimate than that which we can have of those which survive among backward peoples. On the other hand, in the past long sweeps of social causation can be traced, and the repetition of similar instances gives play to the comparative method, which reveals the essential and ever-present conditions of similar phe- nomena, and makes it possible to distinguish the nonessential elements of situations in which the phenomena are observed, affording an elimination of the accidental and isolation of the essential, like that effected in the laboratory. And from the highly evolved complexity of the present we can escape to the comparative simplicity of earlier stages.

Is the idea of the social process the answer to the question with which this section opened : What phenomena are the objects of the sociologist's attention? Is it enough to say in answer to the question : He is a student of the social process ? And have we identified a kind of process which fulfils the conditions enumerated above, so as to require the existence of a separate science which is not economics or politics or any of the older special social sciences, but the newer science of sociology? This idea that the sociologist is not a student of things, of fixed results, but of a social process, which finds expression in all the phenomena that are studied by the special social sciences, and which in essence and method is not peculiar to any of them, but underlies them all this conception, when first it took shape in my mind, seemed to be the revelation for which I was striving. But further reflection raises further questions. This is not so much the recognition of a new kind of reality as further insight into familiar realities ; and what it requires may not be a new science, but only completer adjustment of old ones to the evolutionary and dynamic point of view. The familiar phenomena of economics, politics, law, reli- gion, etc., require to be studied as manifestations of process, the static as instantaneous photographs of the dynamic, the permanent