Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/170

156 range of facts with which their question deals. They would say to themselves: The thing that we want to understand is this immemorial complex of cooperating men in which we find ourselves forming a part during our passing day. The fact that greets our eyes is that men fill the world; they crowd upon each other; they express in outward action their inward thought. This expression of thought brings things to pass. It makes and remakes the mold of institutions within which individual careers are pursued. It modifies people. It transforms all the human elements in the world. This human action and reaction is, on the one hand, never the same in two successive years. On the other hand, it is all one endless, incessant, indivisible process from beginning to end. The men on the stage of action never change all together and at once. They relieve each other in relays or shifts. There is total substitution of actors after a while, but by such means that unbroken continuity of action is preserved. It is all one long, mixed, mysterious commingling process. To our first view it is simply continuance. We cannot find its beginning; we cannot find its end. Men have lived together and rubbed against each other, and so have produced all our ways of life, such as they are.

Can we grasp all this in a single view that will help us hold it before the mind's eye for inspection? Yes, we can sum it up in one word—association or society—always meaning by it human association or society. That word gives us a unified object of thought. It does not explain anything that we want to know, but it presents the thing to be explained as a single concept. The implications of this concept are to be discovered, and we have only put the stupendously complex question in more convenient shape when we reduce it to the easy form. What are the facts about association or society? The term society stands for all the people whose presence within the world-making process, at any time, earlier or later, has in any degree affected the process. Society, then, means the total of effective human beings working in their various ways within the bounds of time and space which our human career has occupied. It is