Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/811

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 795

peculiar work. How accurate are these preliminary generaliza- tions ? What similar generalizations must be added in order to schedule all the traits common to associations of men ? What more intimate laws are contained in these data ? Such ques- tions set the problems for sociology.

To illustrate : We have long had statisticians of various sorts. They have tried to enumerate and classify various details of human association. Whether or not they have ever thought it worth while to formulate such an obvious truism as that associa- tion always involves a greater or less numerousness of indi- viduals associating, the generalization is a datum of common and of scientific experience. The query arises : Do associations take on varying qualities with varying numerousness of the asso- ciated individuals ? This query at once makes the axiom and truism of statistical science a datum that demands a whole sys- tem of inquiries which belong in wider reaches of sociological science.

Again, the ethnologist discovers that one human association is what it is because of other associations with which it is in contact. The church historian discovers that religious associa- tions have been molded by political associations, and the politi- cal historians tell us that governmental associations in one state have been modified by contact with governmental associations in another state. Here is the fact of interdependence. The sociologist says : This is not an isolated phenomenon. Wher- ever there are human associations there are interdependences among the units, and between the association itself and other associations. This fact of interdependence must be understood, then, in its full significance, if we are to comprehend the condi- tions and laws of human association in their widest and deepest scope.

Again, demography and the history of science and phi- losophy show people in their spatial distribution and in their various degrees of remoteness from each other in ideas. The social psychologist generalizes this commonplace circumstance, and detects in it a clue to significant regularities of fact and process in association. He derives from all that he knows about