Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/822

 8o6 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

have to develop "economic science." Or, if we want to learn the lessons of political experience, if we want to know how bodies of people joined together in states have fared in their attempts to live together as states, and to maintain themselves against other states, then we have to abstract from the whole mass of experience that is made up by the total history of all men, past and present, those portions of that experience which are primarily and evidently civic. We have to gather all the facts that are available about bodies politic. We have to set those facts in order, so that they will tell the utmost about the underlying principles which the facts manifest. We have to develop "political science."

But there is a more general and universal desideratum than either of these, or many more that might be scheduled. Men as men, not as specialists, want to understand the bearings of life as a whole. We want to know where and how to place our- selves in the confused tangle of activities that all men are carry- ing on together. We want to understand the conduct of life as a totality, so that we may make our individual lives, if possible, more intelligent factors in this whole, and so that we may move toward such adjustments of these incalculably various lives that the total of human conduct may become more intelligently uni- fied. This desire to know the whole of human life, with a view to wiser conduct of life, has made men study in turn the various phases of life that are the particular objects of interest to the special social sciences. Sociology is not a rival of these sciences; it is a part of them, and an inevitable outcome and culmination of them. Expressed from the other point of view, each of these sciences is a pitiably incomplete part of the process of knowing its own subject-matter, unless it passes into the sociological synthesis and finds its completion there. Sociology advertises that, although we are just beginning to understand the intricacy of human life, it is possible to represent it in ways that will afford more connected views of the parts that compose it. These views are all the more trustworthy and valuable because they do not necessarily consist chiefly of novel details, but to a considerable extent frankly throw familiar details into new