Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/680

 were actually separated from the individuals, nothing of it could remain. But this completed knowledge is denied to men. The relations of human beings to each other are so complex, so ramified, and so compact that it would be a wholly hopeless task to resolve them into their elements, and we are consequently compelled to treat them as unities rather than as self-existing structures. It is, therefore, only a methodological device to speak of the essence and the development of the state, of law, of institutions, of fashion, etc., as if each of these were a unified entity. We cannot resolve the unitary aspect which they present to us into its components, and it is, therefore, a scientific interim-filler if we treat this aspect as a something that has an independent existence. This provisional convenience is like our treatment of the “life processes” as though they were a proper entity, although we assume that they are merely the complex of the endlessly complicated mechanical reciprocities of the minutest parts of the organic body. In like manner is the conflict to be adjusted between the individualistic and, as we may term it, the monistic conception of the social structure. The former corresponds with the fact, the latter with the limited power of analysis; the former is the ideal of intelligence, the latter the stage of understanding actually attained. In our knowledge of physical organisms we have succeeded in thinking beyond the idea of a vital power that seemed to sway over the separate organs, and to compose a new entity in addition to them. We have, in part at least, substituted for this conception the reciprocal action of the organs. In like manner we must attempt in the social sciences to approach nearer and nearer to the individual operations which produce the social structure, however far we may be obliged to stop short of complete analysis. In the case of our particular subject-matter the question might be formulated in this way: When we see that the most manifold socializations betray the operation of apparently specific efficient forces, in order to self-maintenance, into what more primary processes may these phenomena be resolved? Although the continuance of the group, after it is once in existence, seems to