Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/209

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY.

VIII. THE PRIMARY CONCEPTS OF SOCIOLOGY. 1

I. The physical and spiritual environment. On the physical side we have said all that is needed for the purposes of this survey in the fourth paper of this series. 2 In a word, sociology is not a physical science, but at every step the sociologist must be prepared to ask the question : To what extent are the activities of men that we are considering influenced by that natural environment which the physical sciences interpret ? Sociology is science rather than philosophy using both terms in an old sense which we shall explain away presently for this reason : We are not trying to construct a speculative, conceptual abstraction, in order to make that the subject of our inquiry. We are not dealing with a subject that exists in a vacuum, or in the clouds, or merely within the realm of thought-phenomena. We are aware that an earthquake, or a thunderstorm, and an outburst of human passion or a play of human sentiment, occur in the same world, and have to be accounted for, in the case of the second order of facts, by reference in part to the same laws which operate in the case of the first order of facts. Why are crimes against property more fre- quent in winter than in summer, and why are the same classes of crime more ingenious in the temperate than in the torrid zone ? For one reason, among others ; that in the former cases the struggle with nature for the means of subsistence is much more difficult. The conditions of life are more relentless. It costs more effort to live at all. The criminal impulse is more sharply stimulated under the pressure of the more acute necessity.

This perception that men are dependent upon physical nature is so obvious that it has often been impossible to break away from the force of its implications sufficiently to see that any

1 The first seven papers of this series appeared in this JOURNAL, Vol. V, Nos. 3, 4, and 5 ; and Vol. VI, Nos. I, 2, 3, and 4.

2 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Vol. VI, pp. 47-60.

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