Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/656

640 It cannot be anything else. The fault of "subjective interpretation" as an arbiter of method is that it is likely to be too little the mind's organization of elements observed in the object. It will consequently be too much the mind's fiction stimulated by certain impressions received from the object, but completed by extraneous material. The report of the object proves, then, to have in it relatively too little of the object and relatively too much of the subject. This danger is inevitable in the long process of deriving universals. It may be averted only by curbing the impertinences of the subjective presumption.

Sociology is essentially an effort to find more adequate categories with which to conceptualize social details, and to organize the contents of these categories into a universal conception. It is dangerous, however, to think anything in categories which cannot be observed, but have to be imputed. In applying such categories we are likely to interpret by deduction from unauthorized impressions that fill the mind in the absence of adequate analysis of the object.

The whole argument of these papers is virtually upon the problem here presented. As the essentials involved will be discussed in various relations, further detail may for the present be postponed.

E. The desirable combination of methods. —It may be said in general that men who have tried to explain social life have tended to vibrate between two extremes. On the one hand they have exaggerated fragments, sections, phases, abstractions, disjecta membra of human activities and conditions, and have neglected the containing whole; or they have adopted a presumption of the whole which took away their freedom so to investigate the parts that more appropriate conceptions of the whole might result. Our thought about human affairs has consequently been a farrago of snap judgments, partial formulations, and promotions of narrow generalizations to the rank of universals. In order