Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/211

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY 1 97

same ideal as the natural scientist, has no use for the fact that occurs but once, unless, by driving out of it that which is indi- vidual, he can break it up into familiar components. For him, the Neronian, Decian, Diocletian, Albigensian, Waldensian, and Hussite persecutions disappear as historical events in order to yield up to sociology something in the way of general notion or statement with respect to religious persecution. The crusades are too unique to furnish a law of crusades. But they may con- tribute to the framing of concepts or truths under such rubrics as crowd psychology, co-operation, colonization, race-struggle, cross-fertilization of cultures, etc.

Just as the Ionic philosophers sought to resolve the universe into a primitive element matter, water, fire or air so the thinkers of ten or twenty years ago imagined a single elementary fact, which should be to sociology what the molecule is to physics and the cell to biology. Some held contract to be the character- istic social fact; others, mutual aid and the division of labor. On the one hand, conflict was held to be the essential social process; on the other, imitation was brought forward as the distinctive fact antedating all co-operation or contract. Finally it was insisted that at the bottom of every social phenomenon lies the constraint of the individual by conventions and institutions.

Now, there never has been a good reason for supposing we shall be able to reduce everything social to a single element. The straining for an elementary social fact was really due to the desire of the best minds to break away from the deadening clutches of the organic analogy. The society-is-an-organism philosophy drew social phenomena into such close relations with vital phenomena that sociology had not room to live. Hence, the restless casting about for that in society which differentiates it from the organism, for some quality in social phenomena which is specific. Now that the analogy incubus has been shaken off, there is no reason to look for a single elementary social fact. When the assay is completed, at the bottom of the crucible will probably be found several ultimates.

What, now, are the final units of investigation in sociology?