Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/133

 METHODOLOGY OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM H?

all I would cite every version of history which professes to report the life of any society, without placing in due proportion and perspective each of the great groups of human workings. These together, not in abstraction, fashion both the individual units and the social combina- tions of the period described. Whatever phase of human fact we choose to learn most intimately, we distort and mangle and pervert it, unless we first get such an outlook over the whole range of human facts that we can see our particular department of men's life in its actual working relations with all the rest.

I regret that the man whom I rate as the most acute social philoso- pher in Europe has a radically different view from my own about the scope of sociology. A short time ago we were discussing our differ- ences, and I tried in vain to argue him into acceptance of my position. Presently I said : " However we may define our territory, the sociolo- gists, at all events, are fighting for the perception that every point in every man's life is related to every point in every other man's life." Like a flash he answered : " There I agree with you ; and when we have made everybody see that, the social problem is solved."

This outline is an argument for synthesis of knowledge and organi- zation of study. Every person who attempts to form opinions about society ought to do enough study of formal social science, as contrasted with study of concrete social facts and abstracted groups of social rela- tions, to get a good working comprehension of the proposition that in the world of people everything is related to everything. Let us not imagine that we are equipped for sane judgment of human relations until we are thoroughly aware that, whatever be our particular field of knowledge, our neighbors, studying other phases of human fact in all directions around our own field, are really completing our imperfect knowledge. Let us be specialists if we may. Let us concentrate our original research upon one of the great phases of human fact. But let us avoid being partialists, by learning how that phase must be coordi- nated with all the other phases in a true report of the world of people.'

This syllabus of method has been prepared to meet the wants of students who are ambitious to investigate society in the most compre- hensive way. It must be said at the outset that scientific method is not absolute but relative. The procedure that is valid at one stage of knowledge is not the appropriate process at another stage. The things that we want to know vary with the progress of general knowl-

• C/. University of Chicago Record, February 4, 1898.