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 196 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

brilliant tints to sober colors. On the other hand, he is intent on those numerous and minute occurrences which record them- selves in the movement or redistribution of population, the changes in the tenure or tillage of land, the shifting of routes and markets, the rise of cities, the multiplication of wants, the accumulation of capital, the growth of organization, the rearrange- ment of classes, the alteration of standards, the hardening of dogmas, or the mutations of opinion.

These dull-hued materials, while they do not lend themselves to picturesque narrative, while they lack the epic or dramatic flavor of riots, battles, sieges and pageants, aie the only kind of stuff from which we can distil general truths or laivs. This is why, as we turn the pages of the best sociological writing of today, we see so few proper nouns, we are struck with the dearth of allusion to dates, places, persons, or events. The phenomena explained are so common that everyone is familiar with them, and so numerous that none of them ever attains the dignity of a historical event.

If history really repeated itself, every historian would be a sociologist in the gristle. But the life of a people is not like a game of bowls, where the pins are set up again and again. It is rather a drama in many acts and scenes. Centuries, dynasties, rulers, parliaments, always differ, and this individual quality is the staple of the historian. He does not disown the particular, he does not shut his eyes to all but the common quality in his facts, in order therewith to build a general notion. He clings to the particular, whereas the sociologist cancels out the par- ticular. The historian who aspires to be "scientific" rather than a mere chronicler or litterateur is eager to know causes, to find the connection of events with one another and with their underlying conditions, to fuse a complex of many individual facts into a characterization that will give you the Reformation or the Victorian Era in a nutshell. But with all his bird's-eye views of nations and of epochs, he never ventures on a law, lest he should therewith divorce himself from his subject-matter, which is always unique.

The sociologist, on the contrary, pursuing as he does the