Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/513

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 499

of association that will ultimately serve as a practical means of analyzing actual society, the procedure that in the end will yield the largest returns seems to be precisely the method to which physical scientists settled down long ago, viz., the examination of cases and the tabulation of results. We have to collect cases of the individual desires in all their associational reactions. The degree of precision with which the work can be done at present may not seem to promise results of high scientific respectability, but that has been the case at the outset vvith most of the larger problems that scientists have confronted. We have reached the necessity, at all events, of tackling the prob- lem : How do men conduct themselves in actual associations when each of the six desires is in turn uppermost ? This is virtually a demand for six abstract-concrete sciences, instead of one of the order of political economy. That is, the things which we want to know about associated men call for an advance beyond the abstraction of the economic man, to similar abstrac- tions which we may indicate in the rough as the physical man, the social man, the scientific man, the aesthetic man, the ethic man. We need to know how each of the other elementary desires works, when it has the right of way, just as we have been learning since Adam Smith how the wealth desire acts when it is decisive. No isolated human interest furnishes the where- withal to move and mold individuals or associations. The inter- ests have each certain tendencies which must be known seriatim before we shall be equipped with the rudiments of knowledge about the social situation. Supposing, however, that we have these series of knowledges about abstractions from human activity, each of them represents merely one ward of the complex lock which guards the whole secret of a concrete social situation. How to bring all into working conjunction is the problem of real sociology.

In the present state of knowledge the suggestion of new- sciences to constitute a six-fold series coordinate with political economy in its orthodox scope will hardly be taken seriously. Nevertheless we shall point out before the close of this paper that in all probability we shall find some application of these