Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/505

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 49!

associations. We recall that these associations are all more or less essential means to ends. They are devices for reaching the same ultimate aims that we clearly or vaguely seek. Thereupon we begin to ask : Is it possible so to classify men's associations that the relativity of their meaning will appear ? Is it possible to see how the human unit works into one association within another, distinctly enough to discover the kind, and at last the degree, of significance of each association for the essential interests out of which and into which life develops ?

The sociologists have assumed an affirmative answer to these questions, and have made beginnings of descriptive classifications of men in their universal activities. Comte tried to provide for such descriptions by the proposal of " social physics." His idea, like that of Quetelet, was of society as a vast machine made up of human units whose acts obey strictly mechanical laws. He would describe human beings and their associations as parts within parts of the social machine. We need not waste words upon the futility of this attempt.

There followed a generation of sociologists who perceived that men associate with each other more intimately than parts of a machine play into each other. The beginnings of scientific biology had been made. They caught the imagination of social philosophers. These men said : Society is not a machine ; society is a living body. Thereupon three notable attempts were made to describe human associations under the analogy of an animal organism. 1 This too, after all that is true is said, was in some respects a crude and dangerous experiment, but even those who are most contemptuous toward it would admit that while this attempt to describe the essentials of society has held the attention of sociologists some progress has been made, and deeper insight has been gained. Suppose it be granted that this gain is in spite of a certain fanciful element in the surroundings of biological analogy. Let it even be admitted, for the sake of argument, that the gains have been made merely in the line of refuting errors incident to the use of this analogy. It remains true that the intricacy and intimacy of human associations are

1 Lilienfeld, Schaeffle, Spencer. Cf. above, Vol. V, pp. 626-31.