Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/503

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY

489

same rule-of-thumb policy that experimenters have time out of mind adventured, sometimes to worse than no purpose, and some- times with fortunate results.

Now the truth is that human associations have aspects and implications that are at one and the same time genetic and static and teleologic and technologic. 1 Probably very few sociologists, however special the studies which have given them most prominence, have entirely neglected the other aspects of social reality. At all events, sociology will be an abortion until it is a successful integration of the genetic and static and teleo- logic and technologic elements involved in the social process, and consequently in sociological theory. It is by no means desirable that division of labor within the sociological field should cease. On the contrary, our problems are demanding further differentiation without visible limit. The desirable thing is that the workers of the types just mentioned shall keep within sight of each other, shall remember that they are parts of each other, and shall acquire more facility in correcting themselves by each other.

To whichever type of investigators we belong, our depend- ence upon ability to catalogue and classify associations is equally real. In the monograph which we shall quote below Dr. Stein- metz has not too severely characterized the poverty of resource from which we derive most of the generalizations that do duty as " inductions " in the social sciences. For discovery of methods in the evolution of associations, or of laws of reaction within and between associations, or of ends implicit in associations, or of means adequate to hasten achievement of those ends, we have no other source of knowledge than the facts displayed by asso- ciations past and present. Whether our immediate purpose is the partial aim of the specialist, or the comprehensive aim of the philosopher who wants to outline the most extensive and intensive view obtainable of the meaning of human life, our alternatives are, on the one hand, resort to speculations, or, on the other hand, analytic and synthetic organization of the facts

1 Cf. PROFESSOR HENDERSON'S article in the present number of this JOURNAL, " The Scope of Social Technology."