Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/817

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 80I

realm of the social is the total of all the give-and-takw^i, considered severally or collectively, that occur among men. If we want to know the quality or the qualities of the social, we have to inspect these givings and takings in the largest pos- sible number and variety of associations, and to note and classify their qualities. So far as we have gone, we find that the social is, qualitatively, not one thing, but many things. It is Tarde's imi- tation and it is Ward's misomimetism. It is Durkheim's " con- straint " and it is Nietzsche's defiance of constraint. It is attraction and it is repulsion. It is mutual aid and it is mutual hindrance. It is consciousness of kind and it is consciousness of unkind. It is selection and it is rejection. It is adaptation and it is the tearing to pieces of adaptations. Furthermore, if we want to know the laws of the social, we have the task first of formulating these give-and-takings in all their meaning relations, and then of deriving the equations of their action, just as astronomers or chemists or physiologists have to derive the laws of reactions within their several fields.

To vary the foregoing propositions we may put the same thing in this form :

Htiman association is men accomplishing themselves. Here is a dialectic the two poles of which are perpetually reinforcing each other. The men are making the association, and the association is making the men. Parallel with this reciprocity in fact there must be a reciprocity in theory. The two poles of the dialectic must perpetually interpret each other. We cannot know the men except as we discover them in terms of their accomplishing; and we cannot know the accomplishing except as we discover it in terms of the men. If we are satisfied with any less compre- hensive statement of the case, we either make up a false process, or we fail to see that the whole thing is one process working itself out from centers of consciousness that are poles of other centers of consciousness. The psychologist and the sociologist are trying to tunnel the life-process from opposite sides ; the one from the individual, the other from the associational side; but there is no way for either of them through the life-reality, unless it is a way in which they meet at last. Dropping the