Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/332

 3l8 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

attitude yields such questions as these : Is society the purpose of human existence, or the means for the individual? Is society, after all, for the individual, not a means, but the reverse, an obstruction? Is the value of society to be found in its func- tional life, or in the production of an objective mind, or in the ethical qualities which it calls into being in the indi- vidual? In the typical stadia of the evolution of societies is a cosmic analogy revealed — so that the social interrelations of human beings might be co-ordinated in a universal form or rhythm which does not appear in the phenomena, but which is fundamental to all the phenomena, and which is also the channel of the root forces of the material facts? Can there be in fact a metaphysico-religious significance of totalities, or is such signifi- cance reserved for individual souls ?

All these and countless similar questions seem to me not to possess that categorical independence, that unique relationship between object and method which could legitimate them as the basis of sociology, as a new science which would be co-ordinate with existing sciences. The reason is that all such questions are merely philosophical questions, and that they have taken society as their object signifies only the extension of an already given type of understanding to a further territory. Whether philoso- phy is recognized as a science or not, the philosophy of society has no legal right to withdraw itself from the advantages or the disadvantages of its relationship to philosophy in general by constituting itself a special science of sociology.

The case is not different with the type of philosophical problems which do not, like the former, have society as their pre- supposition, but rather inquire after the presuppositions of society —that is, not in the historical sense, which would require a des- cription of how a given particular society, or the physical and an- thropological traits, actually came into existence on the basis of their society. Nor is the question in the case here under con- sideration as to the specific impulses which move the persons concerned, upon meeting other persons, to the reactions which sociology describes. The question is rather this : Supposing such persons are given — what are the presuppositions of their con-