Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/407

 METHODOLOGY OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM 387

(c) Laws of /«{ fortuitous association (crowds), etc., etc.

All these are probably parts of more inclusive laws of association. The sociologists are gradually tending to the perception that here is a problem near at hand, viz., to make out the most general laws of human association.

The discovery of this problem at once settles some of the pre- vious controversies. It is clear to all sociologists who understand the requirements of positive science that the general must be found in the special. It is not something that exists outside of the particulars. In other words, the search-sciences about society are the immediate sources from which material for generalization of the laws of association must be drawn. If those search-sciences have not yet done their work well, they must be called upon for better work ; but their primary function is obvious, viz., discovery and preliminary arrangement of the data. The task of finding larger truths than the search-sciences have reached about the laws of association requires the construction of new catego- ries, and such arrangement of knowledge brought in and primarily organized by the search-sciences that the categories will be properly filled out.

Instead of arguing from a/wr/principles how these categories shall be arranged, it will serve the immediate purpose better to cite tentative categories that have been proposed, and to point out that they have served to clarify sociologists' conceptions of the task to be under- taken. We may pass directly to Herbert Spencer. Without criticising the process by which Spencer reached his categories, and without attempting to decide how much of his whole system is speculative and how much genuinely inductive, we may start with the fact that, as the case lies in Mr. Spencer's own mind, he has taken into view, by title at least, all the elementary facts that occur in human life. He has a place for each of these facts, in his scheme of sociological classifica- tion, regardless of whether they are originally discovered by anthro- pology, or history, or philology, or economics, or whatever.

In Principles of Sociology, Mr. Spencer distinguishes certain great groups, in which he marshals these facts from ail sources. These groups of evidence are :

Part I. The Data of Sociology (which prove to be no more and no less data than the evidence in the following groups) :