Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/798

782 these instances have to be put together in order to discovery, through comparison, of the common element of truth, i. e., of the factors contained in all. This work is always attempted, or the results that presuppose such work are to a greater or less extent assumed, by every person who deals with any part of social science. This is an evidence, by the way, that it is all one subject artificially divided. When we come to criticise the working division lines between scientific tasks, it appears that the historian, as such, has the duty of getting out some of the raw material. The sociologist is trying to show, among other things, how these different kinds of raw material may be organized into a fabric of general knowledge about the essentials in human society. In other words, sociology gets all of its real content through old and new search-sciences dealing with factors in the social whole. The special social sciences get their correlation from sociology; or better, the particular aspects of the common subject-matter dealt with respectively by the special sciences get their rendering in terms of the whole through sociology.

After this unequivocal assertion that sociology is not concerned with a reality apart from the subject-matter of many familiar sciences, a restatement of the raison d'etre of sociology is due. All human thought moves within the apparent bounds of things on the one hand and of people on the other. All the study that men devote to people converges properly toward generalization of specific, accidental, non-universal details into knowledge of what is universal and essential in human conditions and in human characteristics. The central question in the science of people is : What is the content of the human per se? This question cannot be answered except as we progress toward answer to the question : How does it fare with the human throughout its career of progressive self-realization? What subjective and objective forces are always concerned when the human puts itself forth in action, and according to what formulas do the reactions occur?