Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/330

 3l6 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

attachment, as recollection or as ineffaceable instinct, furnish the means for more cruel, deeper wounding injury than is possible in the case of alienation from the beginning; in brief, how is that observation to be represented as realization of forms of relation- ship between people; what peculiar combination of the social categories does it present? That is the present point, although the singular or typical description of the occurrence itself must always be solely psychological. Taking up an earlier suggestion, we may, by disregarding all differences, compare this with geometrical deduction which takes place in connection with a figure drawn on a blackboard. All that is here given and visible is certain physically produced chalk-marks ; what we have in mind however, with our geometrical interest, is not these marks, but their significance for geometry; and that physical figure, as a de- posit of chalk particles, is completely alien to that significance — while on the other hand, the figure as this physical structure may be brought under scientific categories, and for instance its physio- logical antecedents, or its chemical composition, or its optical im- pression may become the objects of special investigation. In like manner the data of sociology are psychical occurrences whose immediate actuality presents itself first to the psychological cate- gories. The latter, however, although indispensable for delinea- tion of the facts, remains outside the purpose of sociological investigation. This latter purpose is concerned rather with the phenomena of socialization, which, to be sure, are carried by the psychical occurrences, and are often to be described only by means of them — somewhat as a drama contains, from beginning to end, only psychical occurrences, can be understood only psychologi- cally, and yet its purpose is not in psychological cognitions, but in the syntheses which constitute the contents of the psychic occur- rences, under the viewpoints of tragedy, of artistic form, or of life symbols.

Although the theory of socialization as such, abstracted from all social sciences which are determined by a special content of societary life, appears to be the only science which has a right to the name science of society (Gesellschaftszt'issenschaft), the im- portant matter is naturally not this nomenclature, but the dis-