Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/804

 788 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL. OF SOCIOLOGY

To recapitulate : The social fact is the incessant reaction between three chief factors: (i) nature; (2) individuals; (3) institutions, or modes of association between individuals. Each of these factors is composite, but at this point we may disregard that phase of the situation. The social process is the incessant evolution of persons through the evolution of institutions, which evolve completer persons, who evolve completer institutions, and so on beyond any limit that we can fix.

Sociology sets out to discover how all the details which any- one may learn about things or about people have to do with each other and are parts of each other in the social fact and the social process. These two phases of reality are, therefore, the setting in which sociology places all detailed knowledge in order to make it complete and true.

Instead of advancing at once from the position which we have repeatedly explained, we may add another alternative statement which will presently lead to a forward step in our argu- ment. We have described sociology as the study of men con- sidered as affecting and as affected by association. As was asserted in the beginning, this is no new study. Men have been engaged upon sections of it ever since they began to be reflective at all. Sociology is the emergence of consciousness that all these sections of study about men in association are parts of one study. This perception necessarily leads to criticism of the previous conduct of the study in its conventional divisions, and to theo- rems of reorganization of the study. Much of the work which has been done in the territory of the social sciences has been wasted, or worse, because the workers have either lost or never had the perception that their particular inquiry is merely a detail in a larger inquiry. That inclusive inquiry is : What are the conditions, the contents, and the operations of human association ? This question will receive partial and approximate answers as the result of progressive application of reciprocal induction and deduction. We shall learn to know details in association by generalizing them into principles of association. On the other hand, we shall learn to know the details better by thinking them in terms of the general expression thus derived by induction,