Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/326

 312 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

minute reactions to the coexisting {das Nebeneinander) in so- ciety, just as it has proved itself operative in the sciences of the consequent (das N acheinander) — ^geology, the theory of biological evolution, history. The immeasurably short steps con- struct the correlation of the historical unity; the equally unim- pressive reciprocities between person and person the societary correlation. That which incessantly occurs in the way of physical and psychical contacts, of reciprocal stimulation of joy and sor- row, of converse and silence, of shared and antagonized interest — all that is the real constructor of the wonderful indissolubility of society, the fluctuating of its life, with which its elements incessantly gain, lose, and shift their equilibrium. Perhaps with this sort of knowledge as a starting-point a gain will be made for social science comparable with that for the science of organic life from the beginning of microscopy. While investigation before that time was confined to the gross, decisively separated organs whose diversities of form and function presented them- selves at once, now for the first time the life-process appeared in its connection with its minutest bearers, the cells, and in its identity with the innumerable and incessant reciprocities between the same. How they adhere to one another or destroy one an- other, how they assimilate or chemically modify one another — this at last gradually permits insight into how the body constructs, maintains, or changes its form. The major organs, in which these fundamental life-bearers and their reciprocations have assembled in macrocosmically perceptible special tissues and per- formances, would never have made the interdependence of life intelligible, if those countless procedures which play between the minutest elements, which are, as it were, first grasped together by the macrocosmic factors, had not unmasked themselves as the real, the fundamental life. Entirely aside from any sociological or metaphysical analogy between the realities of society and of organisms, the point here is the analogy between methodological conceptions and their development. We are concerned with the discovery of attenuated threads, of minimum relationships be- tween people, from the continuous repetition of which all those great objectified structures which afford a real history have been