Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/327

 THE PROBLEM OF SOCIOLOGY 313

built up and maintained. These quite primary processes, which build society out of the immediate individual material, are accord- ingly, along with the higher and more complex processes and structures, to be subjected to formal scrutiny. The particular reactions which present themselves in these masses, to which theoretical vision is not quite yet accustomed, are to be tested as society-building forms, as parts of socialization in general. In- deed, these apparently insignificant types of relationship may profitably be subjected to investigation which shall be the more thorough in the degree in which sociology has thus far neglected these phenomena.

With this turn of the discussion the researches here planned appear to be nothing but chapters of psychology, or at most of social psychology. Now there is, to be sure, no doubt that all societary occurrences and instincts have their seat in souls, that socialization is a psychical phenomenon, and that for its funda- mental fact — viz., a multiplicity of elements becoming a unity — there is not even an analogy in the world of matter; since in the latter everything remains confined in the invincible apartness of space. Whatever might be the sort of external occurrence to which we might apply the designation societary {gesellschaft- lich), it would be a Punch and Judy show, not more intelligible and not more significant than the merging of clouds or the en- tangling of branches of trees, if we did not recognize quite inde- pendent psychic motivation, feelings, thoughts, needs, not merely as bearers of those externalities, but as their essence and that which really alone interests us. The causal understanding of any social occurrence whatsoever would therefore be in fact attained if psychological data and their development according to "psychological laws" — problematical as the idea of these is to us — permitted us completely to deduce these events. Moreover there is no doubt that whatever of historico-social existence is within our means of comprehension, is nothing else than psychical concatenations which we reconstruct with either instinctive or methodical psychology, and bring to subjective plausibility, to a feeling of the psychical necessity of the developments in question. To that extent every history, every depicting of a social condition.