Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/521

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 507

We may concede that the generalizations referred to in the pre- ceding chapter and at the opening of this paper are the product of observation and reflection which could hardly be called final. If we propose inductive verification and refinement of these provisional formulas, it is obviously necessary to have collected as a basis of induction a vast number of cases of all sorts of association, and to have examined these cases so closely that their distinguishing marks will serve as means of classification. In other words, general truths about association may be dis- covered by the sort of guesswork that may easily pass as intui- tion. Evidence, worthy of scientific repute, that the guesses are correct must consist of generalization of enough cases to exclude the probability of all contradictory or inconsistent formulas. This perception challenges sociologists to catalogue and classify human associations.

Our argument with reference to a program of classification cannot be presented in a word. Its successive steps may seem to wander from the path of direct reasoning. It may be well, therefore, to anticipate the conclusion at which it arrives. The theorem which we shall reach by a course of criticism now to be outlined is substantially as follows : Human associations are not things, they are processes. To know them we must ascertain their functional values, just as truly as we must know both the general and the special service to be rendered by a wheel or a shaft or a valve or a connecting gear, in order to be able to classify that part of a machine, first in its immediate relations to the machine as a whole, and then in a general mechanical scale. Human life, in the individual or in associations, is, as we have seen, a process of realizing latent inter- ests. The life of a given primitive group, of a people at any stage of historical development, of any contemporary civilization, or of a minor association within an earlier or a later civilization, is a stage and a factor in that process. Human assocations must be classified then, not as though they were constant structures, but in view of the fact that they are variable functions. They must be distinguished by the part which they perform in the life-process. Inasmuch as that part vanes according as the whole process is less or more highly developed, the classification of associations that would satisfy the facts of one stage of