Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/163

 THE SOCIOLOGISTS' POINT OF VIEW 149

Dividing animals according to whether our habit is to shoot, or poison, or work them is not going very far toward understanding them.

Some of our customary divisions of men are quite as unintel- ligent. When we talk of the "professional classes" and the "politicians," and the "business men," and the "working men," and the "capitalists," our distinctions are possibly of the "game, vermin, and stock" variety. We are probably dealing in superficialities. We are postponing good knowledge of the part played and the merit earned by different sorts of people.

From the sociologists' point of view, then, we need to study society because it is the surrounding, the "environment," as the biologists say, in which all of us live and move and have our being. It is stupid and costlv to let our thoughts about society be vague or wrong or partial. To live well we need to under- stand the circumstances that surround our attempts to live. The sociologists propose systematic study of society in order to develop the power and the habit of seeing society, and seeing into society, and seeing through and around society, for the sake of power to see beyond society as it exists today and into social conditions that may be desirable and possible tomorrow.

Most people never see what they see. A parlor game some- times called "Observation" makes amusement out of this fact. A score or more ot small objects arc scattered upon a tray, and the players are instructed to file by the table and notice the objects. Then, upon pain of forfeit for each omission, the players are called upon to write a list of the articles on the tray. The results always illustrate the fact that \vc seldom see all that we sec. This is notoriously true of social relations. Only a tru exceptional people have seen, for example, that a part of our own life is lived by people miles away, whose names we have never heard. Because certain men in Montana or the Argentine or Australia have raised a particular luved of sheep, we arc able to wear some parts of the clothing at this moment on our bodies. Those distant people have been dressing us for years, while we have given scarce a thought to their existence. Who puts fork