Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/229

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 21 7

that we think, alj that we do, is a function of our fellow-beings before and beside and beyond ourselves.

We are not professing that the term association reveals any- thing new except in the sense that every generalization of famil- iar things is a revelation. Every man who had ever seen apples on a tree knew that, if the stem broke, the apples would fall to the ground, but it took Newton to express that fact in a form that took in all the like facts in the world. When Newton made his generalization of the law of gravitation, it did not tell any new facts, but it enabled people for the first time to see a like element in a multitude of old facts which had not seemed to have any common element of likeness before. So our present term does not purport to increase the sum of knowledge. It merely arranges knowledge so that it can be put to more intelli- gent use.

Of course, there is no magical value in a word. This term "association" explains nothing, although the moment we get the perception that every individual or social situation is a fraction and an episode of an association we have a pointer toward explanations. The term, like all those which this paper empha- sizes, merely affixes a name to a constant phase of human facts. It thereby signalizes the reality of that phase of things. It records the importance of the reality, and it invites attention to the reality. In thus proposing a technical term for one of the universal conditions of human life, we remove one of the excuses for false, distorted, fictitious versions of the facts of life. Like each of the terms in our schedule, our present term, " association," proves to be a mute cross-examiner of all evidence and theory about social facts ; e. g., we have a concrete problem, say a juve- nile delinquent, a widespread practice of tax-dodging in a city, an astounding indifference of the Christian nations of Europe toward Turkish misrule. There is not only a possible but a very familiar way of treating situations of which these are types, as though the fact of association did not exist. To be sure, it cannot be utterly excluded from anyone's attention, but it is made an entirely negligible quantity. If the total-depravity theory of the individual is used as the explanation, if the action