Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/411

 METHODOLOGY OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM 39'

agree that the real problems in this department of knowledge concern the laws of variants only; the law of constants emerging in the pre- vious inquiry.

The present condition of systematic thinking upon the social prob- lem is this :

A. We have so clearly discerned the need of more detailed and more authentic knowledge that enormous demands are made upon the search- sciences for more of the sort of evidence which their processes must supply.

B. The thesis of Simmel, that sociology must be the science of social /or»ij, has at least this effect upon the present stage of correla- tion, viz., it makes us conscious that we have no adequate schedule of the "forms" of social life."

C. That being the case, we obviously cannot have adequate analy- ses of the laws of those forms.

D. The perception is spreading that the study of society up to date has accumulated merely an unclassified catalogue of social influ- ences ; that our knowledge of these influences is, at the most, only qualitative, not quantitative; that we have tentatively generalized many of these influences, both statically and dynamically ; but that our formulations of them must be highly questionable until our schedules and classifications of social forms are more complete and critical.

E. There are, therefore, the following kinds of work to be done upon the fundamental social problem :

1. Further collection and primary analyses of elementary material.

2. Generalization of this material into a hierarchy of the forms of associated life. If Simmel has not been the path-breaker in this part of the work, he has surely given precision to the formulation of the task, and has offered the most exact specimens of work upon it. His sort of criticism may give value to Spencer's material {vide pp. 388-9, above), which it does not at present possess.

3. Extension and criticism of the catalogue of qualitative social forces, both static and dynamic. Here are to be tested all the special and general hypotheses in social psychology (Durkheim, Giddings, Jhering, Ross, Tarde, Vaccaro, Ward, et al.).

4. Teleological construction, on the basis of our inevitable valua- tions, and such tentative generalizations as may from time to time be adopted.

' Vide Thon, American Journal of Sociology, January, 1897, pp. 568, 570.