Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/808

 792 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

religious, artistic, that overspread the same space, or in the most diverse fashions link individuals widely separated in space. Add occasionally in the series a chart showing lines of persons passing from each of these groups to each of the others, and thus main- taining inter-associational association. The whole sum of things that these diagrams would symbolize and vaguely suggest would be that association which is the total of activity in the world of people. Men have analyzed and described this association in whole or in parts in various conventional ways which sociology by no means wishes to supplant. Sociology finds, however, that, whatever may be the value of the different conventional ways of treating association, they do not suffice to bring out all the most essential relationships in association, or to exhibit those relation- ships in their actual functional dependence. We may treat sexual, racial, civic, ecclesiastical, or industrial association in turn without discovering the universal traits of association, or the most essential relationships of individuals to the association under either form. Hence the sociologist looks out over this seething complexity of men conditioning each other, and he says to himself: "These institutions that men maintain are products and incidents and accidents. The essentials are men themselves and their reactions with their physical and spiritual conditions. It may be that the reactions of men with their conditions are not best indicated in terms of race, and state, and church, and trade. It maybe that these give too fragmentary and superficial reports of the essentials in men and associations. Therefore we will try to look through and beyond these conventionalities and to see the more significant realities that are behind them. We will try to look at men in more general categories, in order to see if we cannot in this way get more profoundly acquainted with them." Accordingly the sociologist, analyzing for himself the con- tents of the circle in the diagrams, finds in the first place uni- versal and manifold association. Getting his observation a little more precise, he first distinguishes between the men associating and the physical environment which forms the place and base of association. He then makes out certain characteristic facts which seem to be ever-present phases of association. These