Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/533

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 513

the special social sciences the more general institutions and structures in whose composition these elements are combined being disregarded; next, there is necessity for a knowledge of all the special social institutions ; then there will exist the pos- sibility of a general sociology, first concrete, then abstract. This is the methodical order, which is at once logical, dogmatic, and historical or natural.

Such are the successive steps in the study of social science. However, as in all the other natural sciences, the human mind successively learns to descend from superficial consideration of the whole to deeper and deeper consideration of its parts. After the preliminary and the indispensable study of the two great social factors constitutive of every society, land and population, which are the subjects of the antecedent sciences, the first step in social science is, then, the statistical or quantitative evaluation of elementary social phenomena. These phenomena may be studied either apart from the organs, groups of organs, systems, and societies in which they appear, or in connection with the structures in which they are incorporated. Even in their abstract study, certain relationships appear among the phenom- ena. However, abstract statistics is not an adequate method, since the statistical elements are comparable only under similar circumstances. In proof of this, the theory of averages, for example, has value from the point of view of population only for members of the same variety of the human species. The arithmetical mean of the height of Laplanders and Patagonians considered together would not correspond to the average height of either race considered separately, nor would it correspond to the real general mean of both races. However, when we pro- ceed from the midst of elementary statistical facts to the study of the social institutions in which these facts are combined, we then succeed in distinguishing in the arrangement and in the development of these institutions certain constant and necessary relations, which are independent of all transitory historical forms. Statistics alone cannot furnish us with a general concep- tion of the organization and evolution of all human societies and of humanity. To enable us to approach and understand this