Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/541

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 527

necessarily be ethic as in the chart. They would be civic, eco- nomic, and biologic.

It will not be superfluous to add at this point the positive statement that the program thus suggested by no means proposes to cut loose from results derived from investigating primitive and minor associations. Whether sociologists admit more or less of the teleological and the technological phases of theory into their conceptions of their science, they will all, if hard pressed, claim to be aiming at knowledge of association at its highest power. What they learn of inchoate or limited association is supposed to be worth learning because it reveals the meaning factors in all association. It is necessary, however, to bring these partial and primary perceptions to the test of applicability and sufficiency within the most evolved associations that we know. Otherwise there is no safety against the tendency to assume that knowledge of very limited abstractions is comprehensive of the whole social reality. If Newton's generalization had turned out to cover the facts in the orchard, but not the facts in the solar system, it would hardly have served as a base-line in physics. So, if an economic formula or a psychological uniformity is made out in the horde or the tribe, or in a particular state or stage of civic development, but cannot be verified elsewhere, it does not deserve to rank as a car- dinal social law. Still less does it deserve such rank if our accept- ance of it as a formulation of facts in the undeveloped or partial association really rests on absence of full knowledge, rather than sufficient evidence about that association. Whatever help is to be had from investigation of the stages and the parts of the social process is wanted at its proportionate value, of course, in the last synthesis that we construct. It is time, however, for real sociology to force a clear understanding that by far the most knowledge of the societies which it is most important for us to know is to be had by direct study of those societies themselves, not by inference from associations remote from them in space and time and type. This involves, however, more intensive study of national sociology than has ever yet been proposed.

The partial products worked out by our discussion so far may be indicated as follows : All the human associations