Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/50

 34 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

currency has been given to the notion that there is nothing deserving the name of science without accurate quantitative knowledge. Quantitative knowledge is by no means always present where there is science that is both intellectually enlighten- ing and practically applicable. It is something to know that a given kind of disease is caused by a given kind of microbe, and that a given treatment will destroy the microbe. Sociology is a science of life. And while neither biology nor sociology ignores or despairs of quantitative results in some connections, a science of life is already a science when it is discovering the nature and method of causation, the forms and kinds of conditioning that promote phenomena of given kinds.

Sociology is a study of social activities, and the conditions of the origin, continuance, and change of social activities. The high- est results of such study, as well as the most important aids to fur- ther advance, are not knowledge of particular instances of change, nor the particular conditions of such particular changes, but knowledge of the types of change and^ forms of causation. This is for sociology what the knowledge of "natural laws" is to physical science. Types of change in social activity, and espe- cially forms of occasion or causation out of which social activi- ties and their changes emerge, are not peculiar to economic or political activity, nor any other activities that form the object of explanation of a special social science. They belong to the social process as a whole, of which political, economic, and ethical phe- nomena, etc., are particular manifestations. And, in so far as this is true, investigation of the elicitation and change of social activities is a comparative study in which each form of elicitation must be observed wherever it occurs, not alone in the field of any one special social science, but throughout the whole range of social activity. If this is true, the necessity of a general social science appears to be demonstrated on the side of methodological theory, and only requires to be emphasized and illustrated by the results of research in this wide field and by this broadly compara- tive method. The results already achieved are quite sufficient to encourage further devotion to this field and method. The full importance of such results can appear only when they are taken