Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/516

 502 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Literary sociology must be banished beyond recall. So soon as classification of peoples and of types of culture shall have made a place for itself in our habits of research, and shall have come to control our minds, it will rout abstract and baseless deduction. It will at each moment recall to our atten- tion the mass of classified facts which we are called to explain and to elabo- rate in order to discover laws.

Chaos is in itself so abhorrent that the mind turns away from it spon- taneously and attends to some abstraction which it gathers out of the con- fusion. On the contrary, a mass of facts once classified is so admirable, and at the same time so attractive, that it fixes the attention. So soon, then, as we shall have succeeded in introducing a little order in the chaos of social facts, the way will be open for others. We shall always, however, have in view the facts, the veritable problems. We shall no longer reason in a vacuum, far from the problems. Classification will present to us so many questions, it will plunge us so deep into that sea of positive and limited problems, that the desire will never more leave us to discover all their most secret depths. Then we shall realize that our science, like every other, has to explain facts, not entertain the imagination with phrases.

The second advantage of this work once accomplished or merely under- taken in a serious fashion, will be the following : Classification presupposes and facilitates collection. Whoever wants to classify must collect. Whoever wishes to collect must complete. To complete the collection becomes an indomitable passion. Now this is precisely what we need. In natural history specialists collect with enthusiasm ; in sociology, with indifference. Nothing will be more effective in changing this state of things than classification. It will be a beginning merely to mention some of the gaps in the description. I will mention only some of the most serious :

1. Primitive peoples are disappearing. If we do not collect facts about them now, they will presently be lost forever.

2. We lack complete and profound descriptions of the social and moral life of civilized peoples. We may indicate our needs in this respect under three heads : (a) folklore ; (K) description of component groups of the popu- lation industrial centers, great cities, etc. We have brilliant samples of this sort of work, but compared with the material they are rare, (c) Descrip- tion of the life and all sorts of peculiarities proper to special classes of the population prostitutes, the criminal and dangerous classes, soldiers, sailors, ecclesiastics, bohemians and wandering artists, nobles, millionaires, etc. It is only within recent years that, thanks to the Italian school, the two first classes have been studied somewhat profoundly, but even these researches ought to go deeper, and they should be extended to other countries. How little we know about these classes ! It will be a long time before studies in this field can be truly scientific. There are great entomological societies for the study of insects, but we do not give ourselves any trouble to know the people who surround us. (cf) Characteristic traits, more descriptive than reasoned,