Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/309

Rh well known. The only thing lacking might be the concept which now for the first time might be brought into action to make known the side of these facts lying along this line, and to display them as constituting, from the viewpoint of scientific method a unity, because of these newly systematized common relations. In presence of the highly complex facts of historical society, which cannot be interpreted from a single scientific viewpoint, the concepts politics, economy, culture, etc., beget such categories of cognition. It may be that these concepts combine certain parts of these facts, with elimination or merely accidental co-operation of the other parts, into a unique historical sequence. It may be that these concepts make intelligible the groupings of elements which, irrespective of the specific here and now, contain a timelessly necessary correlation. If now there is to be a sociology as a special science, the concept of society, as such, apart from the external aggregation of the phenomena, must subject the socio-historical data to a new abstraction and co-ordination. This must go to such an extent that certain peculiarities of the data already observed in other relations should be recognized as belonging together and consequently as constituting the subject-matter (Objekte) of a science.

Such a point of view results from an analysis of the idea of society, which may be characterized as a discrimination between form and content of society. We must accentuate the fact, however, that this is here properly only an analogy, for the sake of