Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/814

 798 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

with its attributive correlates "associational," "societary,'" or "social," shall receive a specific and systematized content. We want to answer the question: "What regularities recur in associations, from the lowest and simplest to the highest and most complex orders ? " Only by so answering do we take the con- cept "social" from among merely formal categories, and fill it with a precise concrete meaning. We may vary our proposition by saying that the formal term " social " is a symbol for all that in associations which is of direct concern to sociology. Or, con- versely, sociology is in quest of those things which pertain to associations as such, and the general term for those things is "the social." The initial task of sociology is to find and formu- late the reality for which this symbol stands.

We may approach this task by elaborating this formal symbol. "The social" being our term for all that is of distinctively socio- logical interest in the whole area of associations, we have the task at the outset of making this formal concept as definite as possible. At the beginning of our inquiry, how much are we able to make the concept "social" mean ?

The answer may be approached by reference to De Greef's thesis, that the distinguishing factor of the social is coiitract. In dissent from this position we have urged' that "it would be more correct, though still vague, to say that sociology deals especially with the phenomena of contact. The reactions which result from voluntary or involuntary contact of human beings with other human beings are the phenomena peculiarly 'social' as distin- guished from the phenomena that belong properly to biology and psychology."

This claim may be expanded as follows : In the first place, we want to indicate, not the essence of the social, but the location, the sphere, the extent of the social. If we can agree where it is, we may then proceed to discover what it is." In the first place, then, the social is the term next beyond the individual. Assum- ing, for the sake of analysis, that our optical illusion, "the indi- vidual," is an isolated and self-sufificient fact, there are many

' Small and Vincent, Introduction to the Study of Society, pp. 60, 61.

'Of course the converse is true, with different ratios of content in the terms.