Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/642

 626 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

element in scientific method, but classification was not beginning and end of their conception of sociology. It was one of the means of developing a sociology. It would be as fair to describe the work of succeeding generations of farmers in this country by the phrases: "the tree-felling agriculture," "the stump- pulling agriculture," "the plowing agriculture," "the rock- picking agriculture," and "the rotation-of-crops agriculture." The men who had to give most of their strength to the different partial processes respectively may have had all the other pro- cesses as clearly in mind as though circumstances permitted their use. The feller of trees functioned with reference to rotation of crops just as truly as the men who lived to practice it. So of the men who emphasized the need of sociological classification.

Classification is an arrangement of abstractions around selected centers of interest. No single classification can ever visualize the social reality, because that reality presents as many aspects as there are subjective centers of attention. The object cut up into abstractions has to be represented by combination of all the classifications which our alternative centers of interest incite us to make. These alternative classifications cannot be put together in any hierarchical order if faithfulness to reality is to be main- tained. To visualize the social reality, it is necessary to learn how to think these classifications as they shoot through and through each other in objective fact, forming the most com- plicated plexus ever observed. If we try to symbolize or for- mulate this plexus in categories appropriate to any lesser order of complexity, we shall either give up in despair or we shall rest satisfied with a falsification of the reality.

B. The use of biological figures. — No scientific movement has been more misunderstood by both friends and foes than that phase of sociological thought to which the present title applies. Barth exemplifies radical misconception of the situation in using the title " the biological sociology." The essential idea which has supplied impulse and suggestion to all the investigators in this group is that everything somehow hangs together with every- thing else, and that science is incomplete until it includes dis- covery of the forms and principles of this coherence. In other