Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/304

 290 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

of which, nevertheless, only the interests of a new feeling and willing mingle in the proposing of questions and the forms of intellectuality. Accordingly, the claims which sociology is wont to make are the theoretical continuation and reflection of the prac- tical power which, in the nineteenth century, the masses had gained, in contrast with the interests of the individual. The reason why the sense of importance and the attention, which the lower classes have forced from the higher, are carried by precisely the concept, "society," is that, on account of the social distance, the former appear to the latter not as individuals but only as a unified mass, and that this very distance creates the appearance that the two classes are in principle connected with each other only in the one respect that together they constitute a "society" (Gesellschaft). Along with this reciprocal class-consciousness, which came into being with the perception of being a society, rather than through appreciation of the significance of the indi- vidual, thought all at once became aware that, as a general propo- sition, every individual phenomenon is determined by innumerable influences from its human environment. This thought even gained retroactive force, so to speak. By the side of present society, that of the past appeared to be the substance which gave being to the separate existence, as the sea to the waves. In this way the soil seemed to be gained from whose energies alone the specific forms into which it built up the individuals became ex- plicable. This thought tendency was reinforced by modern relativism, that is, the inclination to resolve the specific and the substantial into reciprocations. In other words, the individual was only the spot at which social threads joined; the personality was only the way in which this joining occurred. Inasmuch as we brought ourselves to the consciousness that all human activity ran its course within society, and that nothing can withdraw itself from the influence of society, it followed that everything which was not science of external nature must be science of society. Society appeared as the inclusive territory, in which ethics and history of civilization, aesthetics and demography, politics and ethnology, congregated; since the subject-matter of these sciences occurred within the framework of society. That is, the science