Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/785

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOL OGY 765

them to do. Likewise non-conformists in going out of their way to flout conventions pay involuntary homage to the influence of society. Foemen, competitors, and disputants so determine one another that it is impossible to gauge them without invoking the external factor. "Social," then, are all phenomena which we cannot explain without bringing in the action of man on man.

If at first blush this calls for a "science of things human," let us remember that sociology is not bound to attend to phenomena that do not manifest themselves on a considerable scale. The individual case David and Jonathan, Lear and his daughters challenges only the artist. Let a case recur often enough to present a type of personal relations, let many lives receive the same standard or ideal from without, and there is room for the generalizer.

Practically one would not go far wrong in saying that sociology deals with the development, maintenance, and disappearance of social planes, classes, and groups, and of the structures, institutions, and cul- tures they produce. By planes I mean particular uniformities in belief and practice created by association. Classes are uni- formities in character or mind which arise in consequence of social life. A more protracted play of the socializing forces creates groups, which are classes, the members of which, having become conscious of one another, draw together and so generate a group-will which reacts upon the individual wills.

In the rag-carpet times of our grandmothers each housewife got her warp from the store, but provided the woof from her own rag-bag. Now the woof of each human being's life is supplied by that which is individual to him ; his heredity, temperament, situation, history. But the warp is supplied from without, sometimes from a very slender stock, allowing little range of selection. Whence and how commonplace people get the knowledge, convictions, tastes, and standards that constitute the warp of their lives is explained by social psychology and although some regard it as the top story of psychology, I prefer to make it the lower story of sociology.

The running of boundary lines acceptable to the biologist and