Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/158

 142 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

his science has to do with the "total output of the human mind." We are accordingly not only confronted with the task of investigating the workings of the human mind, in all its essential operations, but the difficulty of that task is enormously increased by the embarrassments introduced through the conflicting claims of people who have attempted to discharge the task. Our efforts to arrange objectively correct cate- gories for the different kinds of products of psychic action are obstructed at every turn by the arbitrary divisions of human "science." We insensibly yield more or less to the impression that facts, as such, must be assignable to groups corresponding with divisions of sciences dealing with the facts. Then we find that a given phenomenon is part of the material of half a dozen or more "sciences." Let us take the present situation of the Austro-Hungarian parliament for example. It may be used as material by ethnologist, psychologist, philologist, his- torian, economist, political scientist, moralist, and sociologist. What becomes of the "boundaries of the sciences " in view of their thus for- aging in the same field ?

The clue to the solution of the puzzle has already been given in Part I. It is, more definitely, that, in general, the sciences dealing with the world of people are either concerned with certain abstractions from the whole sum of facts, or they deal with the facts in so far as they are access- ible through certain restricted sorts of evidence, or so far as they can be discovered by application of certain peculiar processes of investigation. The phenomena themselves form one whole, appearing to us in count- less manifestations. That complex aggregate is represented by the De Greef chart (above, p. 139). No portion of that chart represents the preserve of any single science. The sciences, physical and psy- chical, are merely good or bad divisions of labor, for the purpose of acquiring such knowledge of the things represented by the chart as will tend to answer the most general questions about the cooperation of physical and psychical factors in the world of people ; such ques- tions, for example, as the one we have formulated as the inclusive question of sociology ; representing an order of generality to which no single division of labor upon human facts corresponds (above, p. 132). In view of the foregoing, it is in order to consider the relations of psychical science in general to the large problems presented by con- crete social conditions.

Before entering upon this part of the discussion it is pertinent to correct an error which has been spread of late by numerous writers on both sides of the Atlantic. The error consists, first, in assuming