Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/161

 THE SOCIOLOGISTS' POINT OF VIEW 147

discuss those scholars who more or less directly contend that all necessary study of society is sufficiently provided for. I am just now more concerned with those unscholarly persons who either tacitly or expressly set themselves against the necessity of any study of society at all. "Why need we study society?"

The first answer to this inept question would seem to be on the face of the fact that nature is one factor and society another with which every human being has to deal. If it is profitable to study nature, it surely is to study society. Society is simply all the people together in any part of the world which may be thought of by itself. "Society" is our town. It is the United States. It is the group of civilized nations with which Amer- icans have intercourse. It is again the whole human family. If we do not use the Word in the remote sense that places " society " beyond the range of ordinary interest, it seems that the word means only something so very commonplace that study of it is rather beneath what we suppose to be our dignity. We have "society," like the poor, always with us. It is perfectly familiar. Why study it ?

People have asked the same question about all familiar things when it was first proposed to study them, and build up scientific knowledge about them. People had breathed air, for example, thousands of years before it occurred to anybody to study air. When scholars began to talk about studying air ordinary people laughed at them. "The idea of studying air! Why not study something worth while ? Everybody knows all about air." It proved, however, that nobody really knew much of anything precisely about air. People did not so much as know that air is heavy, that it is elastic, that it is a mixture of gases, etc. People said the same thing when scholars talked of studying water, either physically or chemically. They said the same thing about the beginnings of the study of plant and animal life— biology. President G. Stanley Hall is fond of recalling the farmer to whom some students of biology had applied for help to find frogs for study. "What is there to study about frogs? I know all about frogs myself. I've got a whole pond full of