Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/202

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY. III. THE UNIT OF INVESTIGATION.

IN Bunyan's allegory the pilgrims to the Celestial City find, even at the very gateway of heaven, a little wicket that admits to a path leading down to hell. In like manner the student of society, after he has traversed the theological and the metaphysical meth- ods of explaining his facts, and has attained to the very threshold of the scientific method, finds innocent-looking side-paths that lead off into the waste. Two of these the analogical and the genetic interpretations have been pointed out in the last paper. I now propose to show how one wanders off into the wilderness by adopting a wrong unit of investigation.

That bizarre forerunner of sociology, the philosophy of his- tory, assumed that the experiences of a particular society Sicily or Poland, for example are but parts of a single mighty process. The life of humanity or at least of occidental humanity can be brought under a single formula. History is a swelling stream formed of the confluence of many tributaries, all taking their rise within the limits of a single vast basin. To explain history as Bossuet would explain it, is to discover the goal of the whole process and the contributory action of each of the various parts.

The widening of the ethnological horizon, however, kept bringing into view other valleys traversed by other streams. Hundreds upon hundreds of currents of social development were discovered no Father of Waters, it is true, like the flood that bears along us occidental millions, but still rivers having a source and a direction of their own. All the variety the philosophers of history could get came from tracing up some tributary of the occidental current, the Etruscan, the Egyptian, Phcenician, or Hebrew culture. But we have found many independent streams of civilization, such as the Peruvian, Cambodian, Mayan, and Chinese civilizations. What of the Ashantees, the Damaras, the Bantu, the Aztecs, the Amerinds, the Samoyeds, the numerous

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