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 490 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

presented by every known phase of human association. It is hardly to be expected that a final classification of associations can be proposed, for associations themselves are not finalized. What we may expect is such use of analyses and classifications appropriate to separate types and phases and stages of associa- tion that our knowledge of the actual social process may move toward completer comprehension. The present discussion is an attempt to point out certain approaches to such use of classifica- tion.

Wherever men have reflected about men they have instinc- tively paid more or less attention to the facts recited and the interpretations suggested in the foregoing chapters and in the passages named in the first paragraph of this chapter. Whether thinkers have carried generalization and abstraction to the point of mentioning "association," or even associations, is immaterial. They have perforce dealt with men in groups, in reactions, in combinations of some sort. The most naive writing about society has had its expressed or implied classifications of men, and these represented actual or conceptual associations (populi romani and gentes; plebs and patricians ; elect and reprobate ; clergy and laity ; civilized and uncivilized ; orientals and occi- dentals ; Latins and Saxons ; etc., etc.).

As the social sciences grew more systematic and sophisticated, their classifications gradually took account of more and more species of association. Ethnology schedules racial associations ; history, by preference political associations ; economics, indus- trial and incidentally other associations. All these classifica- tions have their uses, which cease when they begin to obstruct discovery of relations which the traditional categories do not disclose. After we have looked out over the human race, and have seen the people of the world divided into geographical, political, racial, vocational, and countless minor groups, we come back to the reflection that these people are, after all, merely variations of the same sort of personal unit that we find in our individual selves. We remember that these diversified associa- tions are merely incidental to the working out by other men of the same life-purposes which we are pursuing in our particular