Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/821

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 805

to make conditions and relationships conspicuous that are either invisible or obscure in the older forms of social science. We need to see aspects of association that we have either ignored or undervalued or never observed. We have been chasing moon- beam expectations of sociological systems before we have begun to criticise or even to collect our phenomena. In a few years, therefore, some of our most pretentious literature will be fit only for the museums of antiquities or the pulp mills. We have reached the obvious necessity of starting at the beginning and of refusing to let our dogmatizing zeal outrun our analytical dis- coveries. We have as terms in our problem : first, the physical environment; second, the fundamental interests of individuals; third, manifestations of these interests in the institutions that are the products of association ; fourth, forms of relationship that are discoverable in these institutions, and modes of operation that are manifested by the same. Now the sociological problem is to express all that occurs in human association in terms of the ele- ments that enter into association. These are, first, the physi- cal laws that c^Mverge in individuals, and, second, the spiritual laws that emerge in individuals.

We may conclude this chapter with a resume of its already numerous repetitions. Sociology is one of the avenues of approach to knowledge of men as we actually find them, in dis- tinction from men as we try to think them by abstraction for various special purposes. Thus, for example, if we want to know the laws of coexistence and sequence between states of con- sciousness in the individual mind, we have to consider men as standing each by himself. We disregard the relations of man to man. States of consciousness have existence, so far as we know, only within individual persons. We abstract one or more indi- viduals from their living and moving with their fellows, and we try to discover what takes place within the consciousness of these individuals. Or, if we want to know the operations of the motive of self-interest in its relations to marketable goods, we have to abstract the economic man from the total man, and ta trace the direction of his activities, and the laws of his activities, so far as the operation of self-interest can be measured : i. e., we