Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/61

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 47

philosophy. The necessity of doing this will be of reciprocal benefit indeed to general philosophy and to sociology.

It would obviously be irrelevant to the plan of these papers to burden them with formal statement of the particular philo- sophical assumptions accepted by the writer. On the other hand, portions of the writer's general philosophy will be exploited without apology in the discussion that follows, whenever they can be made useful in expressing sociological perceptions. An instance appears below (pp. 62 sq.} as introduction to the third assumption. The thesis at this point is merely that adequately conscious sociology will hold its material human associations as a segment of reality within the entire reality which requires philosophical wholeness when completely formulated. In so far as we at any time have a philosophy that satisfies our conception of reality as a whole, our sociology is in consequence logically liable to answer for any apparent discrepancy between its formu- lations and the larger structure. Of course, the converse is in its turn true, as we have implied above, 1 but the consideration to be emphasized under this head is that sociology will succeed merely in being impertinent if it attempts to complete itself without being answerable to general philosophy on the one hand, as well as to literal experience on the other. 2

2. The cosmic assumption. The fact to be emphasized under this head is that even those manifestations of life which are apparently most spiritual have their existence within and by per- mission of conditions that are ultimately physical. These physi- cal conditions have effects which, though more remote and more partial, are just as real as the influence of physical conditions in the case of a volcanic eruption or the destruction of crops by a cyclone

For example, we may be concerned with the quantity and quality of literary production in the United States. At first glance this is purely an intellectual matter. DeTocqueville, Mill,

'Vol. V, pp. 641, 779, 789, et passim.

2 No better illustration can be cited of attempted adjustment of sociology to general philosophy than that contained in RATZENHOFER'S Sociologische Erkenntnis. This entirely apart from opinions pro or con about the validity of the philosophy which the author posits.