Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/532

 5 l6 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

social reality, and they have together received the name "sociology."

A similar form of conclusion must follow due consideration of each attempt to account for the historical movements of society. Earth's second title is "The Anthropo-Geographical View of History." Having shown in the foregoing paragraphs how a single one-sided view of past events has helped to form our methods of thinking, and to make scientific demands more precise and adequate, we need not consider other one-sided views at equal length. The outcome in each case is essentially the same. Each one-sided view has drawn attention to an actual factor in the problem of society. The sociologists are now stating the problem in terms of all these factors so far discovered. The form of the sociological inquiry is not the old form of the historians: "Is the secret of human life this or that?" The sociological form of inquiry is: "Given observed forms of influ- ence in human affairs, how much of each detected form of influence is present in a given social movement, and in what measure does it work ?" The several one-sided views have thus been merged into a many-sided inquiry.'

We should notice, in passing, that a similar practical result is produced upon individuals by the study of the social sciences. Whether a given student gets a system of social doctrine satis- factory to himself or not, he emerges from the study of the social sciences, as at present organized, with a perception that the world of people is the arena of many interactive influences. In his judgments, either of past times or of current events, the student of the social sciences, from the sociological point of view, is forearmed against the narrowness that presupposes the preva- lence of a single force rather than the interplay of many forces. The outlook that sociology makes familiar brings into the field of view the whole number of modifying influences that have been discovered among men. The sociologist, studying the present condition of China or Turkey or Japan or the Philippines

■ Vide Chamberlin, "The Method of the Multiple Working Hypothesis," /"«"«<»/ of Geolosy, November, 1897. This article is a veritable sermon in stones, which the sociologists would do well to consider. Mutatis mutandis it may be taken bodily as a lesson in sociological methodology.