Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/809

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 793

facts are not terms in a series, but they are coexistent aspects of a constant reality They have various relations to the whole associational unity, but they are equally and alike traits of that unity. In a later chapter we shall name a score of such traits. It by no means follows that these terms must be the categories under which sociology is to arrange its processes or results. They are rather some of the phases of reality which sociology proposes to investigate more closely. They are data which we derive from all our present means of thinking men as associating. These data present the sociological problems, viz.: In what forms do men associate ? By force of what influences do men associate ? What are the indicated ends of association ? What are the available means for attaining these ends ?

To repeat again : The sociologist looks out on the same world of people that other students of social sciences con- front, but he looks with a differentiation of interest that focal- izes his attention in a distinctive way. Other students want to know orders of facts and relations that to him are merely helps to perception, and then to comprehension of other facts and relations which inhere in the same social reality. The ethnolo- gist, for instance, wants to know the facts of racial association. The sociologist says : " Perhaps we assume too much when we start with the presumption that the profoundest truths about racial association are to be discovered by studying racial associa- tions alone. It may be that some of the peculiarities that we find in racial associations, and which we regard as attributes of race, are incidents of geographical, or political, or vocational, or cultural, or sexual, or merely personal association. It may be that some of the things which we attribute to race occur in mobs made up of an indiscriminate mixture of races. There are innu- merable sorts of association in which there is action and reac- tion of individuals with very marked results. Consequently we need to investigate associations of all orders, if we are to be sure that things which we attribute to membership of one asso- ciation are not equally or more characteristic of other associa- tions. It is by this extension of view alone that we shall be able to trace the ultimate and fundamental relationships between indi- viduals."