Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/181

 THE SOCIOLOGISTS' POINT OF VIEW 167

political boss to the whole plexus of social relations he steps out of his special province to tread a different soil, talk a differ- ent language, use different tools, and work at different tasks from those of his specialty, and then his abstraction will lead to perversion unless it is harmonized with other abstractions. This harmonizing, or synthesizing, or integrating process has not yet been sufficiently provided for in social science. In other words, the sociologist maintains that specialism is partialism unless it is organized into realism. The sociologist demands, therefore, that the light of all special social knowledge shall be thrown upon the actual activities of living men. He is trying to organize attempts to achieve perfectly adequate social self-consciousness. If he actually proceeds with this end in view, a sociological scholar may choose between several sorts of alternative. He may devote himself exclusively to problems of a very special nature like the relation of various types of liquor legislation to the morale of citizens ; or the social influences peculiar to rural settlements ; or the positive and negative factors apparent in the process of adjustment between whites and blacks in a given community ; or he may devote himself to the quite differ- ent task of organizing and formulating various kinds of results from such special researches, or from more general investigation. There is no basis for sociology in addition to the collection and interpretation of the general or the special facts, historical and contemporary, thus referred to, and the organization of those facts, first, into a vast system of evolutionary interpretation, like that of which Spencer has proposed a scheme, and, second, into a vast chart of social correlations, like that of Schaeffle's Bau und Leben. For an indefinite time to come sociology as a set of "principles" will exist only in the visions of speculators.

With reference to all these questions of fact about society, and so far as the kinds of explanation are concerned which this paper has discussed, the sociologists are contending for a pro- gramme, a perspective, and a method. They ask for correlation and cooperation of sciences, not for liberty to substitute a new science. The purpose of integrating social investigation so that,