Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/820

 804 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

less inevitable, more and less desirable, more and less modifiable and controllable in human conditions and actions.

This recapitulation brings us close to a perception which must be developed in later chapters. In a word, the universal fact of association, in all its varieties of scope and form, is an affair of individuals who are storage batteries of interests. All these phenomena of association are permutations of these inter- ests that lodge in the individual. Whether we call these general facts "characteristics" or "circumstances" or "incidents" or "conditions" of association makes little difference, so long as we avoid using either word as a snap judgment about facts and relations which require further investigation. The main thing is that when we break away from the conventionalities of the older social sciences, and look out over human associations without using those conventionalities as spectacles, we see some general peculiarities of association that promise to reward further atten- tion, especially by giving new meaning to familiar aspects of association. It is a fair presumption that further search with the aid of these clues will result in profounder knowledge of the specific social relationships than has been gained by study of them in the forms of the traditional sciences alone. It is the belief of the sociologists that it is possible so to generalize the facts which ethnology, history, economics, political science, and psychology analyze that we may presently have, not only a sociology that uses these facts, but a sociology that will in turn be a basis for these sciences in an improved form ; a basis that will furnish means for discovering more facts and better ones in the peculiar territory of these special sciences.'

This survey enforces the further conclusion which it has been hard for the sociologists to accept, to which comparatively few of them are even now reconciled, viz., that sociology cannot fur- nish any credible generalizations of laws until it has patiently studied conditions which confront us when we refuse to have our vision restricted by the categories of conventional social science. The very best thing that sociology can do in its present state is

■ Vide " Methodology of the Social Problem," AMERICAN Journal OF Sociology, November, 1898, pp. 385 sf.