Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/128

 1 14 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

have clung while exploring the unfamiliar social deeps. It is certain, however, that no recognized science borrows its laws from other departments of knowledge. The lasting possessions of sociology will be regularities which, instead of being imported from without, have been discovered by patiently comparing social facts among themselves.

With Analogy has gone the vice of Exteriority. The social group has been studied from the outside as if it were a nebula, a crystal, or an ovule. But in the study of nature this reliance upon sheer observation is not a sign of strength but a confession of limits. How differently we should conceive the tasks of crystallography if we could question the molecules and learn just why they comport themselves as they do ! How otherwise we should describe chemical processes if the atoms could tell us of the "affinities" they obey! Not all our observations of the canals of Mars are worth for science a five minutes' inter- view with the Martian Commissioner of Public Works. Now, by contenting himself with uniformities instead of causes the sociologist, with his "law of differentiation" or " law of parallel- ism" lightly renounces at a stroke the enormous advantage of living inside of society and knowing just why its units behave as they do.

We want to know causes, and the cause of a collective phe- nomenon must be something that influences behavior. Society is, indeed, not the temple of reason but neither is it the theater of mechanical forces. There is little important human action which is wholly blind and unconscious. A causative interpreta- tion of social facts must consider the thoughts and the feelings of the units whose behavior is to be explained. Until they are adequately motived common beliefs or actions have not been accounted for. Now, after eschewing analogy sociologists did not at once proceed, as they should have done, to seek the causes, i. e., the motivation of occurrences. They dallied away precious time at a half-way house we may call the Genetic Interpretation.

The aim of the genetic sociologist is not to show why, under the