Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/810

 794 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

When we approach the study of men from this center of attention, we at once perceive in the world of people certain facts that are evidently of tremendous significance, which, however, have not yet attracted sufficient notice to be made the objects of severe scientific investigation. We have these facts given to us piecemeal by all the perceptive means and processes within the competency of ordinary experience and of the traditional social sciences. Our education makes it impossible for us to think of the world of people without thinking certain relations between people. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage from the sociological point of view ; for, on the one hand, we must use these particular means of knowing people in association in order to get our data ; but, on the other hand, we thereby get our data mixed with conventional construings of the data that to a greater or less extent prejudge the very questions which our center of interest brings into focus. This, however, is not peculiar to sociology. It takes place in every field of research, as knowledge advances from the less exact to the more exact.

The sociologist has taken up the clue that certain principles of regularity run through all human associations, and he wants to find out what these principles are. There are various possible ways of approaching the study, and we are now to exhibit the beginnings of one of them. In a word, the preliminary process that we shall outline is this. We survey all human associations that we can bring within our present field of view, and we set down features that seem to us to be common to human association in general. If there is any force in the precedents of all other scientific inquiry, the data that we thus select as the material to be studied have a very different look at the outset from the appearance which they will have after all available processes of investigation have been exhausted upon them. We do not select scientific data and forthwith pronounce them dogmatic conclu- sions, any more than we sit down at the beginning of a journey and declare ourselves at the end. The things that we see in human associations in general, with such insight as we are able to bring to bear on them now, are merely some of the data of sociology, and with these data sociology must begin to do its