Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/232

 220 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

The thesis corresponding with the title of this section is : Every portion of human experience has relations which require appli- cation of this concept "process" Human association, or society, is a process. Every act of every man has a meaning for every act of every other man. The act of Columbus in discovering America is going on in the act of reflecting on this proposition, and our reflection upon this proposition has a bearing upon every act of every man now living or hereafter to live in America. All the acts together which make up the experiences of man in connec- tion with America constitute the becoming of a social whole, and an organizing and operation of that whole beyond limits which we can imagine.

Our present thesis anticipates nothing with reference to the nature of the social process, or its mechanism, or its results. We are concerned at the start merely with the empty, formal con- ception that human experience, whether taken in its minutest fragments or in the largest reaches which we can contemplate, is, so far as it goes, a congeries of occurrences which have their meaning by reference to each other. The task of getting for this concept, "the social process," vividness, impressiveness, and content, is one of the rudiments of both social and sociological pedagogy. That is, if we are trying to get the kind of knowl- edge about society which the sociologist claims to be all that is worth getting, because it is all that is complete in itself, all that goes beyond partialness and narrowness and shallowness, we must learn to analyze that portion of experience which we are studying, in terms of the process which it is performing. For instance, suppose we are studying history. Our attention will be given either to more or less detached series of events, or we must ask, " Just what phase of the social process is going for- ward in this period?" A conception of the general meaning of the period as a whole gives us clues to the proportions and other relations between the particular events. It gives us pointers about the classes of occurrences best worth watching in the period. It enables us to determine in some measure whether we have actually become acquainted with the period, or have merely amused ourselves with a few curious details which had a certain fractional value within the period.