former kind of knowledge is description, narrative, story, tradition, that does not rise to the generality of science. The latter kind of knowledge may be organized into science of a certain order of generality. This has occurred, schematically at least, in the case of the accepted social sciences-ethnology, history, economics, etc. The sociologists are attempting to develop a general science, which will have relations to the special social sciences analogous with the relations of general physics to the special physical sciences, on the one hand, and to the various physical technologies on the other; or analogous with the relations of general chemistry to subdivisions of chemistry; or the relations of general biology to subordinate sections of biology.

Comparisons of this sort are so loose that they might easily prejudice the case under discussion. They are merely illustrations, necessarily inexact, but presenting certain instructive parallels. Let us suppose that, at a certain stage in the development of the science of physics, investigators had acquired considerable amounts of knowledge about groups of physical phenomena determined by relatively superficial marks. Let us suppose that one type of physicists had specialized upon gravitation, with the least possible attention to all other phases of physical phenomena. Suppose another type had in the same way confined attention to the phenomena of light; another, to those of magnetism; etc. Suppose that in each case the knowledge gained by such abstraction had been carefully systematized. This whole body of knowledge would doubtless have had a certain value. Obviously that value would have been narrowly limited, however, because such arbitrary isolation of things that are essentially related is possible only so long as insight into the real facts is rudimentary. Modern physics could not come into existence until, by some means or other, students of these things had learned to entertain the idea of the unity of their phenomena, resting in an underlying unity of substance manifesting the phenomena. That is, there could be only superficial arrangements of amateurish observation, not respectable science, until a unifying conception gave coherence to the details observed. Thus the conception of matter, and of the molar and molecular processes of matter, might have arisen after

a long history of such unconcerted specialization as we have supposed. These conceptions would presently serve as bonds of connection between the scattered workers. They would serve as clues to common interests between them. They would lead to meanings previously undiscovered in the phenomena, and they would promote further investigation of the phenomena. Thus, in place of desultory pursuit of knowledge about interesting physical facts, there would arise a science of physics. Although actual development of physics has not literally followed this order, the essential development has involved virtually the above stages. Consciousness of a subject-matter, on the one hand manifesting diverse phenomena, and on the other hand strictly delimited from other subject-matter, has been a precondition of a science of physics at once comprehensive and independent.

We may vary the form of the illustration in the case of chemistry. Suppose something like our present knowledge of chemical occurrences had grown up before there was any such generalization as "matter" or "atomic phenomena." Suppose some men had by some sort of intuition grouped the metals together, and had observed their behavior under different circumstances. Suppose others had studied salts, others acids, etc. Again we should have had a certain grade of knowledge, in a certain system of arrangement, but we should have had no science of chemistry. There must first have arisen a conception of an order of phenomena common to all matter, and conforming to laws varying merely in details according to the composition and circumstances of the particular portions of matter in question. Otherwise more or less interesting information about capriciously distinguished sorts of matter could never attain the dignity of a science of chemistry.

The like is true of biology, and the literal history of biology has perhaps more obviously conformed to the logical necessity we are citing than the history of physics or chemistry. The "natural history" still found in many schools, harks back to conceptions of the organic world which are logically neither more nor less respectable than the traditional English farmer's division of the animal kingdom into "game, vermin, and stock." No matter how

patiently one type of men studies plants, and another reptiles, and another fishes, and another birds, and another beasts, and so on, neither one nor all of them could go much beyond advertising the need of a biological science which did not exist. In order that dilettantish natural history might pass over into positive biology, it was necessary that all observation of living nature should submit to control by an antecedent conception of organic matter and laws of the variation of its phenomena. In a word, whatever the chronological order of occurrence of the ideas, all the concrete and special knowledge that goes to make up our present sciences has been unified at last around some central conception of subject-matter and appropriate method. We may express the fact for our present purposes in the formula: Physics is the science of matter in its molar and molecular processes; chemistry is the science of matter in its atomic processes; biology is the science of matter in its organic processes. In each case the comprehensive science has the task of organizing details which may already have been studied separately by several varieties of scholars. The same logical methods which have arrived at these generalizations make irresistibly toward the conviction that coherence and unity of knowledge about human experience demand a science of men in their associational processes. Many of these processes have long been studied in detail, but study of them in their correlations is, as in the case of chemical and vital processes, the work of a distinct order of science, with a peculiar object of attention. To the range of generalization which the needed general science comprehends in the present case the men who have most felt the need apply the name sociology.

Without referring to details which might further guard this summary comparison, our present. interest is in the fact to be illustrated in the case of sociology. The phenomena presented by human beings have been studied in ways which are on the same logical plane with the treatment of organic phenomena by the obsolete types of "natural history." Not to mention the lesser social sciences, conventional history and economics and ethics, as represented by still extant types of thinkers, are sometimes as fragmentary and unvital and uncentered as a "science" of garden

vegetables or of draft horses would be, if not correlated with larger knowledge. The sociologists represent a protest against this situation. The protest has been long in developing out of the spontaneous, inarticulate stage. It is rapidly finding its voice. The formula which we are emphasizing expresses the implicit assumption of all the sociologists who are to be taken seriously. If they could, they would materially weaken the force of the names used to designate the conventional divisions of sciences pertaining to man. The past and present convenience of these names, and of the academic classifications for which they stand, is counterbalanced by the obstructions which they oppose to the progress of real knowledge. They interfere with discovery that all serious students of society are investigating phases of the same subject-matter. The supreme need in the human sciences at the present moment is to make out what that one subject-matter is, and how the different kinds of research are related to it. This central and circumferential reality appears to the sociologists as the associational process.

Wherever there are human beings there are phenomena of association. Those phenomena constitute a process composed of processes. There can be no convincing science of human life till these processes are known, from least to greatest, in the relation of each to each and to all. Knowledge of human life which stops short of this is at best a fragment, and at worst a fiction. Hence we assert that studies of selected phases of human affairs, no matter how ancient and awful the tradition that sponsors them, are logically in the class of pseudo-sciences, until they take their place within the plexus of sciences which together interpret the whole process of human association.

Men who call themselves by either of the names that signify attachment to either of the traditional divisions of knowledge, are at liberty to define their intellectual interests for themselves, and to shape their individual pursuits accordingly. Thus certain interests may posit a "science" of archeology; others, a "science" of epigraphy; others, a "science" of cartography; others, a "science" of numismatology; and so on, up to history and law and economics. Each type of men may cultivate their

peculiar section of knowledge as though it outranked every other kind of knowledge. Not group provincialisms, however, but the reality of objective relations, must determine at last, whether a selected portion of knowledge is relatively a fragment or a whole, relatively insignificant or important. No incident, phase, machinery, institution, product, stage, or program of human life, is central enough to clothe knowledge of it with more than the rank of a tributary science. The process that is taking place among men, through the ages and across the ages, is the largest whole of which men can have positive knowledge. This whole consequently fixes the goal of complete science of human life. No less than this whole is contemplated by the sociologist as his aim. He necessarily represents a desired generalization of knowledge which is farther than any other scientific program from actual or probable completion. Sociology thus defined is, and must remain, more a determining point of view than a finished body of knowledge. At the same time, and by virtue of both these sides of its case, sociology exposes the relativity and the partialness of any body of knowledge which comprehends less than the full sweep of the social process. Whatever be the appraisal of the fractional sciences in the subjective estimate of their promoters, the objective importance of each of them is measured by the kind and amount of tribute it can bring to knowledge of the human process as a whole.

These conceptions have been expressed in such general terms that repetition in less abstract form may not be superfluous. Wherever two or more human beings are within each other's ken, there is set up between them action and reaction, exchange of influence of some sort or other. That influence, on the one hand, molds the individuals concerned, tending to make, unmake, remake them without end; and, on the other hand, it composes those individuals into more or less rigid group-relationships, perhaps after having decomposed previous relationships to another group. This reciprocating process, growing infinitely complex as the circle of association widens, and as the type of individual becomes more and more evolved — including besides its form, the content of the process, first in the evolving objective conditions within which the