Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/527

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 513

Phase 2 is that marked by contacts between people inci- dental to their common zeal to make the most of the world's material resources. Here the categories of economics and mechanical technology must primarily be decisive.

Phase 3 is that characterized by realization of the need of control, regulation, organization beyond that spontaneously adopted in the course of applying labor power to the develop- ment of material resources. The classifications of political science must here be fundamental.

Phase 4 is that in which conduct in association recognizes the authority of some standard not given in physical impulse or material economy or civic necessity per se, but presupposing some utility to which all these and all the individuals concerned are subordinate and mediate. We cannot say here, in symmetry with the propositions immediately preceding, that the categories of moral science must be taken as standard. On the contrary, the fundamental utility of sociology is in its prospective fur- nishing of a criterion for criticism of ethical categories. The different moral systems, whether obsolete or still effective, posit standards of obligation more or less external to the life- process. Doubtless complete historical analysis of human experience would have to employ a great many variations of morphological and functional classification corresponding to the ethical presumptions that actually prevailed. Ethic association of many different qualities has been actual. There must be many reciprocal relations between these social phenomena and our objective analysis of them, on the one hand, and our con- ceptions of absolute ethical criteria, on the other. At this point we may simply say that our classifications of present associations in their ethical phase must conform to our fundamental theorem (yid. p. 509) as to the whole social process.

As we have hinted above, there may have been distinct periods during which each of these phases of association, or at least each with the one or more placed before it in the list, covered the whole field of association to the exclusion of later phases. Whether this is absolutely the case is not a matter of first-rate importance. For our present purpose we have no