Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/24

 8 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

are satisfied with cutting human experience up into little chunks, that may be seen and handled with ease. We are uttering wise- sounding saws about these fragments of things, but we are not ferreting out the ultimate connections of things by which they are related as wholes. The entire range of time and space occu- pied by human beings is a continuum filled with unbroken per- sistence of human interests toward satisfaction. Every occur- rence of human life is a function of all the social forces engaged in this ceaseless effort to express themselves. To explain society, we must be able to state every type of occurrence that takes place in human association in terms of the ultimate elements, namely, purpose-reactions in the individuals that are factors in the occurrences. Only here and there a person has discovered the difference between this sort of explanation and mere photo- graphing of wide fields of unexplained events by means of essen- tially descriptive formulation. In other words, the work of causal explanation in the field of social phenomena has just reached the stage of discrimination between mere repetition of the circumstances in a phrase or formula that is explanatory in form, but in essence only a descriptive generalization of the things to be explained, and, on the other hand, actual identifica- tion and measurement of the involved factors.

Looking toward the future it is easy to distinguish two lines of development which can hardly fail to characterize the social sciences in general, and especially those workers in pure or applied social science who fully adopt the sociological view- point. In the first place, the work of analyzing social processes will encounter subgroups of problems, upon which research must become more and more specialized beyond any limit that can be foreseen. Sociology as pure science must necessarily repeat in a way the experience of biology. On the basis of a fundamental conception of process, it must differentiate many groups of prob- lems relating to particular processes. 2 Probably the tradition of applying the term " science " to work and results in connection with an abstracted group of problems, will remain in force. As

1 For illustrations, vide the papers of Professors Thomas and Ross, in this Journal, Vol. X, pp. 445 and 456.