Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/791

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY 771

in two cases : ( I ) if the phenomena it treats of flow from the same desires that cause other kinds of social phenomena, or (2) if they are produced by individual desires, special in character, but so socialized and fused that they amount to a social need and the satisfying of them amounts to the discharge of a social func- tion. Apply now these tests to the principal social sciences.

Take the science of religion. Will it shrink to a mere chap- ter in sociology? By no means. It might if faith were nothing but an incident of speculative thought or of social discipline. If pious beliefs were an outgrowth of collective thought and never of personal experience, if in worship men sought benefits rather than obeyed impulses, we might treat religious phenomena as a mere division of social phenomena. But religion has a private as well as a public aspect. It is not all a matter of social psy- chology; still less is it a matter of social institution. Nor is it a side issue to something larger, a by-product of sex-feeling or conscience or economic calculation. It has a tap-root, and this tap-root is that strange invasion from the sub-conscious self which is variously known as ecstasy, rhapsody, divine afflatus, or gnosis. Experience of this kind generates religious convic- tions. The yearning to taste or renew this "communion" leads men to pious exercises. Let these individual phenomena occur on a large scale and you have cults, creeds, and churches stand- ing out in bold relief on the face of society. The actual sweep of a religion is, of course, due in large measure to self-seeking, propitiatory motives, and to its maintenance as a prop of social order. Thereby it falls under the surveillance of the group-inter- est and comes to sympathize with the changes in other depart- ments of social life. Religion is, in fact, a growth springing from the soil of human nature, but taking its shape and hue from a social medium. The science of religion is for this reason under a dual dependence, owing allegiance to psychology no less than to sociology. It is this situation Mill has in mind when he says : "The different kinds of social facts are in the main dependent, immediately and in the first resort, upon differ- ent kinds of causes, and therefore not only may with advantage, but must be, studied apart."