Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/314

 300 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

and the same in content, may display itself in very diversely formed associatings. E. g., the economic interest realizes itself both through competition and through deliberate organization of the producer, now through detachment from other economic groups, now through attachment to them; the religious contents of life, while remaining identical in substance, demand now a free, now a centralized community form; the interests which lie at the foundation of the relations of the sexes get their satis- faction in more varieties of family formations than can be enu- merated ; the pedagogical interest leads now to a despotic relation of teacher to pupil, now to individualistic reactions between teacher and each pupil, now to more collectivistic relations be- tween the former and the totality of the latter. Just as the form in which the most diverse attempts occur may be identical, so the stuff may persist, while the associating of the individual which is the vehicle of this stuff may move in a variety of forms. Thereby, although in their objective concreteness stuff and form constitute an indissoluble unity of the social life, the facts furnish precisely that legitimation of the sociological problem which demands the identification, systematic arrangement, psychological explanation, and historical development of the pure forms of association.

This problem is in direct contrast with that in accordance with which the special social sciences have been hitherto created. The division of labor between them was determined entirely by the variety of the contents.^ ^ National economy and church polity, the history of pedagogy or of morals, politics or theories of sexual relations, have divided the realm of the social phenomena among themselves so that a sociology which would comprehend the aggregate of these phenomena, with their interpenetrations of form and content, could prove itself to be nothing else than a correlation (Zusammenfassung) of these sciences. So long as

"This should be qualified. The ostensible division has been on this basis. The division has always been proved to be impossible in practice, and the history of the social sciences would furnish forth a pathetic joke-book of the wallowings of scholars trying to make their definitions afford firm footing among the facts.