Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/315

 THE PROBLEM OF SOCIOLOGY 30I

the lines which we draw through historical reality, in order to divide it into separate regions of research, connect only those points which mark similar interest-contents — so long will this reality fail to afford any room for a special sociology. There is needed rather a line which, intersecting all those already drawn, detaches the pure fact of associating, in all its manifold forms, from its connection with the most various contents, and consti- tutes this fact its peculiar sphere.^ ^ Sociology will thereby become a special science in the same sense, in spite of the differ- ences of methods and results, in which epistemology is a special science. The latter has abstracted the categories or functions of cognition as such from the multitude of cognitions of specific things. Sociology belongs in the type of sciences whose special character consists not in the fact that their object belongs with others under a higher order of generalization (like classical phi- lology and Germanistics, or optics and acoustics), but rather in that it brings a whole realm of objects under a particular point of view. Not its object but its manner of contemplation, the peculiar abstraction which it performs, differentiates it from the other historico-social sciences.

The concept "society" covers two meanings which, for scien- tific treatment, must be kept strictly distinct. ^^ "Society" is, first, the complex of associated individuals, the socially formed human material, as the full historical reality has shaped it. "Society" is, second, the sum of those forms of relationship by virtue of which individuals are changed into "society" in the former sense. In a parallel way we use the word "cube" (Kugel), first for material in a definite form, second, in the mathematical sense, for the mere shape or form by virtue of which the cube in the former sense comes into being through the shaping of mere material.

" I have often pointed out that sociology must either select some minute block of work on some neglected "content," or it must carry out a programme upon a different plane from that of the older divisions of labor in the social sciences. Cf. discussion with Professor Hoxie, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. XIII, pp. I, 209, 392, 399.

" The discussion which follows adds cogency to the claim urged above that the attempt to rescue the word "society" from merely popular convenience, for use as a term of precision, is worse than futile.