Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/788

 768 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

prudence. The craving for communion with the Unseen would bound the field of the science of religion. The attraction of like for like would make possible the science of association. There would be as many social sciences as there were facets to human nature, and if any bond drew them together into a larger syn- thesis, it would be supplied by psychology and not by a general sociology.

The mere statement of the requirements to be fulfilled in order to assure the sovereignty and equality of the special social sciences is a sufficient answer to such claims. Each is not the exclusive field of action of certain impulses. So far as specific cravings exist, they react upon and modify one another, they lie under the empery of the accepted world-view or ideal of life, they are trimmed and adjusted to fit into a plan of life. More- over, turning from the sphere of mind to that of society, we do not find one species of activities or institutions answering to the religious man, another to the political man, a third to the ethical man, or a fourth to the sociable man. The method of abstract- ing from human nature all its propensities save one in order to get that one propensity operating, as it were, in vacua received its quietus when economists gave up speculating about "the economic man."

Although there are several facets to human nature, although each aspect of social life has in some sort a psychological basis of its own, still, the deeper we penetrate into the causes of human affairs, the more impressed are we with the cross-relations between social phenomena of different orders, and the more evident is the consensus that unites facts the most diverse in character. " Every culture form," says Grosse, " is, as it were, an organism, in which all parts and functions stand in the closest interde- pendence." Much of our progress in the knowledge of society consists in establishing correlations, tracing subterranean actions and reactions between remote institutions. Reputations have been made by exposing the hidden link that unites slavery with cotton culture, caste with conquest, manhood suffrage with free land, the patriarchal family with pastoralism, the multiplication of wants with the rise of a leisure class.