Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/800

 784 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

before it is available for the sailor, so with general sociology. Like any other science at its best, when it is at its highest power it will be comprehended by relatively few people. It will first influence the forms of thought among select specialists. These will influence the forms of thought among leaders who come into direct contact with larger numbers. The authorities of second- ary orders will in turn distribute guiding conceptions throughout classes more and more removed from the technical viewpoint of the sociologist. Meanwhile experiment with the arts of life will progressively create a social practice between which and social theory there must be an increasing interchange of correction and corroboration.

Possibly it will appear in a few hundred years that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the relation of the sociologists to right thinking about the world of people was closely analogous with that of Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century to right think- ing about the world of things. We have to establish a per- spective that visualizes the whole human world in place of the unrelated parts that our abstract sciences have dissected out of the whole. Studying the human reality thus as a whole we have to learn how to measure more genuinely the parts out of which this reality is composed. This knowledge of general conditions will not guarantee intallibility about specific tasks, but, other things being equal, it will insure more intelligent grasp of the special conditions.

Virtually the same things that have been said so far in this chapter may be restated as follows :

"Held together in social relations men modify each other's nature."' This proposition presents the social fact in its most evident form. It involves the initial problem of sociology, viz., what are the details of the modifications which men's natures undergo through reciprocal influence ?

The social fact may be described from another angle of view thus : The social fact is, first, the evolution of the individual through, second, the evolution of institutions, and the incidental reaction of all the individuals and institutions upon each other. That is, at any given moment individuals and institutions are

' GiDDlNGS, Principles of Sociology, p. 377.