Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/531

 THE SCOPE OF SO CIOL OGV 5 1 5

fact of the individual. He is the only possible social unit, and he is no longer a thinkable possibility. He is the only real pres- ence, and he is never present. Whether we are near to resolu- tion of the paradox or not, there is hardly more visible consensus about the relation of the individual to the whole than at any earlier period. Indeed, the minds of more people than ever before seem to be puzzled by the seeming antinomy between the individual and the whole.

In this play between unscientific, uncritical, wholesale assumptions about society, students have been brought to face a specific problem, namely : Given individual elements in society, given also a certain coherence of society by virtue of which influences stronger than those of any individual persist, or at least influences persist with more than the personal energy of any individual, what are the specific modifying and differentiat- ing factors which procure social motion, progress, development ? Accordingly the historians, independent of the sociologists, have struck out in a new direction in the present half-century. The older historians told of the fortunes of persons, of states, of humanity. The newer history, however, becomes more specific and realistic. Both in theory and in practice it considers nations as the vehicles of culture. It traces the development of their internal conditions. It compares them with each other. It tries to fix upon what is typical in each, and by that course to arrive at the history of humanity.

Even in conservative Germany perceptions of scientific demands which have arisen in the course of arriving at such historical views have produced sociologists. They are not recog- nized in many of the universities, but they are working under various titles — philosophers, historians, economists, etc. They are searching for the most general truths about human associa- tions, and about the forces that are working in them. In other words, the friction between the individualistic view of history and opposing views has been one of several distinct producers of inductive inquiry into real conditions. When the different inductive inquiries so provoked have become aware of each other, they have been seen to constitute a new line of approach to