Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/534

 520 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

have classes, orders, and species as in the case of the other prime divisions of states. It need hardly be repeated that, in propor- tion as the differentiating motive is severely and purely ethical, the subsidiary means, involving the machinery and personnel of the civic and economic and biologic substrata merged into the ethic association, would furnish merely the stigmata of subordi- nate groups in the ethical hierarchy, coordinate with similar groups in the previous hierarchies.

We are now ready for the observation that in all actual states, whether biologic, economic, or civic, there has doubtless been a certain emergence of the impulses characteristic of all the states logically subsequent. Even the biologic states have had their incipient economic, civic, and ethic systems, or at least factors. Accordingly we could not develop a comparative national sociology without classifications in which subdivisions would be formed by variations borrowed from social conditions which would have to be scheduled as later in both genetic and logical order.

Applying all this formal and hypothetical analysis to the task before us, we have the following indications :

1. There has been and still is an evident vocation for social sciences that describe and classify parts of the activities of men which prove to be only abstractions from the whole social process. It is an important step toward knowing the whole process to work out systems of classifications in which the different phases of these abstractions are exhibited in logical relations to each other. Thus we have facile tools in the classi- fications of anthropology, ethnology, political science, econom- ics, and ethics respectively.

2. In attempting to describe any national society whatever, whether inchoate or developed, we find that it is not an abstrac- tion of the same sort as that made by the sciences just men- tioned. It is an abstraction from the rest of the people of the world, but not from the activities that the other social sciences in turn formulate. It is necessary in each case of such concrete abstraction, therefore, to have in mind the categories of each of the social sciences, and then to discover which sort of activity is