Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/19

 THE VINDICATION OF SOCIOLOGY 5

From this point of view, if we stick to our analysis of actual processes, instead of allowing; ourselves to be backslidden into substitution of dialectics for analysis, it is merely a question of time when we shall become aware that, above the uncertain line beyond which physical causation may be treated as furnishing the relatively constant conditions, while psychical causation intro- duces the decisive variants, the whole knowledge problem may be reduced to the desideratum of knowing man acting. If the psychologist, rather than the sociologist, were making this reduc- tion to lowest terms, perhaps lie would prefer to substitute some- thing like this : Our problem in understanding human experi- ence is to learn the conditions, the means, the processes, the prod- ucts, the purposes, and the values of sentient activities. How- ever we phrase it, scientific reaching-out after understanding of life as it is conceives it as from first to last a correlation of functionings, the meanings of which have to be found first in the elemental processes themselves, and then in as much as can be discovered of the whole continuity of processes which they compose.

With the view of the human reality as an incessant becom- ing of persons, and of relations between persons, through func- tional reactions within and between themselves, and with the physical conditions, the methodological question is sooner or later inevitable : Have the categories and the techniques, worked out mostly in accordance with earlier and very different fundamental conceptions, said the last word about ways and means of investi- gating and interpreting experience as we now conceive it ?

So far as the sociological movement has declared and system- atized itself, it is, first, merely the negative answer to this ques- tion. It does not thereby declare its independence of other divisions of social investigation, but it announces its refusal to be limited by their untenable prejudices. The sociological move- ment is, second, constructively, an effort to show how our knowl- edge processes need to be reinforced, in order to go as far as our means permit toward understanding human experience. It is not, as the traditionalists labor to make it appear, an amateurish dis- regard of tools of precision which scientists have perfected. It