Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/57

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 43

special kinds of action, which may be. abstracted and considered without tracing their relationships very widely, have attracted multitudes of superficial men into pseudo-scientific dealing with social questions. A second reason is that the philosophically capable men who have entered the sociological field have too often devoted themselves so exclusively to some relatively minute detail abstracted from the whole that they have straightway lost their sense of proportion and perspective. The respectability of sociology depends, first, upon its success in maintaining its appro- priate subordination within the entire knowing process, and then upon its success in assisting to guide the other life-processes. The former phase of the situation is beginning to exert its appro- priate influence in determining sociological method. We have now to point out certain factors that are prominent in this read- justment. In attempting to do so we assume the outlook sketched in the previous papers of this series, but we retrace our steps and start at the beginning of sociological analysis. In the remainder of the series we shall attempt to indicate in greater detail some of the content of these more general propositions. Whether our conception of an aspect of reality which we wish to know is that it is something distinctly set apart from other reality, or an inseparably integrated portion of reality, the knowing process waits upon some sort of discrimination between the immediate subject-matter and that other from which it is dis- tinguished or abstracted. Involved sooner or later in this pro- cess of discrimination or abstraction is the more or less definite consciousness of certain spheres of relationship into which the selected portion of reality extends, in spite of the conceptual delimitation. Thereupon there is further involved either dissipa- tion of attention over the whole content of consciousness or, in the interest of more intensive knowing, some taking-for-granted of things beyond the immediate subject-matter things with reference to which our chosen material must at last be located if our supposed knowledge of it is to be credible. For our present purpose we mean by "assumptions," then, all those aspects of reality which form parts of the background of sociology, which, however, do not fall within our immediate field of investigation.