Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/696

 676 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

than a comparative sociology. Quite the contrary. It will be a growing organism into which will be assimilated and integrated the labors of successive workers, each of whom will have devoted himself more or less exclusively to the consideration of some one phase or factor of the whole. It is not impossible that the com- parative method in sociology, from being considered at first as a mere method, and later as a method plus certain results, will later still be seen to be the best available symbol of the habits of growth according to which the reality considered has developed and continues to develop ; and in accordance with which also the science of that reality has had, and must continue to have, its evolution. For only so can sociology become that which it is an ambition of every science to become eventually, i. e., a perfect account of the actual constitution and behavior of that aspect of reality, the importance of which to human interest has called into being the science in question.

Since the application of the comparative method' to a given subject-matter implies that those portions of that subject-matter which it is proposed to compare with each other exhibit some common trait or are susceptible of being viewed from a common standpoint, and since, in accordance with the foregoing, we assume that the subject-matter of sociology is susceptible of having applied to it the comparative method, the question arises at once : What are these common traits, what are these common standpoints, which will serve as fundamentals upon which to base our comparative study of the phenomena of association ? For, up to a certain degree, the more numerous and the more constant these may be, the more likely is the application of the comparative method to yield a body of data of sufficient impor- tance to rise to the dignity of a science.

' The words " the comparative method " are not unambiguous. The whole process of gaining knowledge is a comparison of one thing with another. The comparative method may be roughly characterized as a specialization of this general process applied to data bearing a certain serial relation to each other. This relation is usually that obtaining in the genetic series. Organisms and their activities, structures and their functions, have an evolution. To comprehend them in a given phase of that evolu- tion we study them in other phases, higher and lower, both in ontogenetic and in phylogenetic series. To do this is, generally speaking, to follow the comparative method, as it is commonly received.