Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/825

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 809

particular departments of research. So in general of any case of actual association between men which we want either to understand or to control or to modify. Each is a fact within the great fact of human association at large. This fact of human association, made up of innumerable constituent associations, has its historical and its contemporary phases, all of which involve active influences in force at each given moment in any specific association. General sociology has, then, first of all, the task of plotting this whole actual system of human associations, and of deriving all the knowledge available about principles that are of general validity within and between associations. Thus the work of general sociology is related to the actual conduct of reflective life in society somewhat as geometry is to applied mechanics, or as general logic is to a particular argument. In other words, general sociology is merely formal and empty and speculative if it is considered as isolated from the rest of social science and self-sufificient. Having an actual content, it is merely one of the stages through which perceptive material abdut human life must pass in getting converted into knowledge of life in its wholeness.

It is to be said, further, and with all possible emphasis, that the results which sociology will reach for a long time to come must be chiefly qualitative, not quantitative. This proposition may be illustrated by use of very familiar material. For instance, every observer of American politics knows that w-e have to reckon with a certain hereditary antipathy to England. We know that this feeling is of two distinct types, viz., that which dates from our colonial times, and that which began to come over from Ireland at the middle of the nineteenth century. We must add to these distinct types of anti-British feeling the less definite and less energetic jealousy of Great Britain brought to us by immigrants from other European countries. On the other hand, we know that there are certain affinities between ourselves and the British. Now, it is a matter of nice balancing in "practical politics" to map out party programs so that these feelings will be discounted. No one can in advance take the precise measure of the pro- or anti-British sentiment. Politicians have to know