Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/167

 ORIGIN AND USE OF THE WORD "SOCIOLOGY" 153

The accompanying analysis of a year's output of sociological literature, noticed in the Annte sociologique for 1902, will serve, in the first place, to indicate the scope of sociological studies as understood by at least one large group of active sociological workers, and, in the second place, to exhibit the relative strength and direction of the sociological movement in the different nations. Here, then, are nearly five hundred different publica- tions selected by the editors of the Ann^e for summarization, on the ground of being contributions made to sociology during the year. These contributions do not, of course, all come from pro- fessed sociologists. On the contrary, the great majority of them issue from investigators working under other designations those e.g., of philosophy or history, jurisprudence or politics, psychology or philology, ethics or aesthetics, folklore or compara- tive religion, anthropology or demography, geography or statis- tics, etc. Assuming that contributions may be made to sociology from each and all of these specialist points of view, the ques- tion arises : How to distinguish, in the researches of psycholo- gists, anthropologists, or other specialists, what is pertinent to sociology, and set it apart from what is, as it were, technical and internal to the particular specialism from which it emanates ? The answer to that question will depend, of course, on the precise meaning attached to the word "sociology," and the degree to which it is co-ordinated with other studies. A better way, per- haps, to put the question is to ask what is the distinguishing mark of the sociologist as contrasted with the specialist investi- gator who studies man under one or other of the different mani- festations called business, law, politics, history, health, mentality, language, fine arts, education, manners, morals, religion, etc.

Before trying to answer that question, let us make the assump- tion that " sociology" is not another name for social psychology or any other sectional study or group of sectional studies. There is, indeed, at the present moment some tendency that way even among sociologists themselves, and the logical result is either the fall of sociology from the rank of a general to that of a special study, or the rising of as many sociologies as there are sectional approaches to the central problems of social development,