Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/222

 210 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

It ought to be plain, then, that our analysis of society, first into personal units and then into the operative interests within the units, is not the construction of an esoteric mystery, to be the special preserve of sociology. It is a frank, literal, matter-of- fact expression of the reality which society presents for our inspection ; and it is the most direct step toward insight into the realities of society. Social problems are entanglements of persons with persons, and each of these persons is a combination of interests developed in certain unique proportions and direc- tions. All study of social situations must consequently be primarily a qualitative and quantitative analysis of actually observed mixtures of interests. Whether it is a problem of getting the pupils in a school to do good work, or of making the religious force in a church effective, or of defending a town against illegal liquor traffic, or of organizing laborers for proper competition with employers, or of securing an enlightened national policy toward foreign peoples whether the particular social situation or problem which we have in hand fills out the four walls of our house or reaches to the ends of the earth, in every case the primary terms of the problem are the particular interests of the particular persons who compose that particular situation.

The phrase "properties of numbers" survives in many minds from their earliest encounters with arithmetic. Whether or not it was good pedagogy to use the phrase we will not inquire, but the idea and the program behind the phrase may furnish an analogy for our present use. The boy who simply makes change for the papers he sells on the street corner has this at least in common with Newton and Laplace, and the bookkeepers, and the actuaries, and the engineers, who carry on the most compli- cated mathematical calculations, viz., they are concerned with the " properties of numbers." So far as the problems of each go, they must learn, somehow or other, to know the properties of numbers under all circumstances where they occur. In like manner, people who seek social intelligence, whether they are street gamins hustling for a living with help from nobody, or social philosophers attempting to report the past and to foretell the future of the human family, all are dealing with the properties