Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/256

 244 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

association, however minute, has its peculiar social ends, subor- dinate, as the members and the association itself may be, to a hierarchy of more inclusive ends, we are prepared to see that identification of the precise ends cherished and pursued by any society is a very considerable item in the program of getting an understanding of that society. The desires of individuals and of societies, from least to greatest, give us, on the one hand, our means of interpreting the social process as a whole; and, on the other hand, our conception of the social process as a whole gives us a basis of comparison by which to pass judgment upon the wisdom or the unwisdom, the progressiveness or the obstruct- iveness, of the social ends actually in view in the particular societies with which we are dealing. 1

All that has been said thus far in this paper is an argument to the effect that, for a long time to come, the chief value of sociology will be derived from the use of its distinctive point of view, rather than from a subject-matter to which sociology can maintain an exclusive claim. Our argument is that human life cannot be seen whole and real unless it is construed in the terms which we have discussed. We do not know anything unless we know it in its relationships. The details of human experience are as meaningless as a form of type knocked into pi, unless we have the clues which enable us to distribute and reset the events. We have called the terms treated in this paper " the primary concepts of sociology." It is hardly worth while to offer here a justification of that designation. In brief, it will be found, after a little experience in studying society with the use of these concepts, that the others to which we now turn, are either details which are met so soon as analysis grows precise, or they are notions necessarily implied by the larger conceptions. Indeed, we have used most of them already, whether they have been named or not.

It is not necessary to offer any general principle about the relative importance of the different concepts. It is sufficient to

1 A group of hypothetical illustrations of social ends of different grades, in the case of states, is proposed in AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Vol. VI, pp. 512-31. Formulas of the social end in general are proposed loc. cit., pp. 201-3.