MacLeod's schedule in accordance with these preliminaries appears in his table of contents (Book II) as follows:

THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS AND AXIOMS OF

We need not commit ourselves to an opinion as to whether the

foregoing is an adequate apparatus of economic concepts. We may

trust the economists themselves for both additions and subtractions. The point is that the foundations of no science are fairly laid until it has reached precision in defining the elementary facts and relations with which it has to deal.

Nor need we turn aside from our main exposition to contend that the sociologists have worked out an adequate apparatus of elementary concepts. Our proposition is that working toward such an equipment is the most fundamental merit of general sociology thus far. The future must test the categories now most in use.'

We must refer to it later in another way, but it is in order to record here the further item, important enough in itself to mark an epoch in the growth of thought, that in the generation since the sociological movement began, the presumption that linear causation is the main connection of human events has given place to the presumption which we may call vortex causation. In other words, the early sociologists shared the idea of all social scientists at the time, that some single great principle would ultimately be discovered, running in the trail of chronology, which principle would be the sole master key to human experience. Whether we still believe that or not, we are not aware that there are any sociologists left who still think we can at present most profitably employ our time in search for such a principle. On the contrary, we are convinced that every actual social situation, innumerable cases of which we must learn to interpret if we are to arrive at objective understanding of life, is a resultant of causal factors which run in on that center from every point of the compass-to speak in a figure of only two dimensions. Among these numberless influences the consecutive or historical in a particular case may be greatest; but it may also be least; and it may have any place in the scale between the extremes. We are therefore less inclined to formulate questions of group cause and effect as problems merely or chiefly of one-direction causation. If we had to choose between alternatives neither of which is sufficiently objective, we should say now that the best picture we have of social causation more nearly

I For a tentative list of sociological categories-not up-to-date-see Small, General Sociology (1906), pp. 401-3. A better winnowed collection is in use as subtitles in Park and Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology, and samples of categories of another order are furnished by the chief titles in Ross, Principles of Sociology.

resembles a chemical reaction than a cable transmitting an electric current straight down from the beginning of the world. If this were all that had come from the sociological movement, it would have been worth much more than it has cost.1

We have thus characterized in the most summary way the meaning of the sociological movement in the United States, from its appearance (marked, let us say, by the publication of Ward's Dynamic Sociology, 1883) to the time of this writing (1923). Stages in the movement are indicated by the literature listed under the title, "Development of Sociological Consciousness in the United States" (American Journal of Sociology, XXVII [1921], 226-31). All that our space permits by way of further interpretation of the movement will be devoted to selected phases of this development.

In his Principles of Ethics Herbert Spencer makes much of the difference between the sentiment of ethics and the idea of ethics. Borrowing that idiom we may say that the pioneers of American sociology were equipped with a high power of the sentiment of sociology, but we can now see that they lacked a dominating idea of sociology as a definite procedure. In place of a precise pivotal conception of sociology, there were feverish longings for a better way of interpreting human experience than the older interpretations had achieved. There were only slight resemblances between several types of experimental substitutes proposed by these innovators, for the methods which they declared abortive. The intervening generation has accomplished much dead work for which future scholars may or may not award full credit. The most prolific result of this dead work is the perception, now elementary and commonplace among sociologists, that human experience always and everywhere runs its course in and through groupings of persons. At first glance these groupings often appear to be permanent, structural, statical-a family or a family institution; a church or a given ecclesiastical system; a state or a particular type of government; unionized labor, as contrasted with isolated workmen. In reality, these groupings, which for brevity we permit ourselves to indicate by the less precise substantive form groups,

'Cf. Small, "Fifty Years of Sociology in the United States," American Journal of Sociology, XXI (1916), 792–95.

are always interactions of persons, that is, processes. We have come to see then that the inadequacy of which our present insight convicts the older social sciences is neglect to find out all that it is possible to discover about the forms, modes, methods, proportions, and intensities of these group processes throughout the range of human experience. Accordingly it has become the sociological division of labor first of all to elaborate the categories of group processes in which human activities occur; and secondly to supplement the other social science techniques by adding to their exposition of given human situations everything that can be discovered by reducing them to terms of these categories.

Whatever then may have been the hopes, and the ideals, and the definitions of the pioneers, sociology in the United States has come to be, first and chiefest, one of the numerous interdependent techniques by means of which research into the facts and the meanings of human experience is now conducted. The sociological technique consists in brief, first, of discovery of categories of recurrent group forms, group movements, group motivations, group appraisals, and group controls. So far as subject-matter is concerned, sociology deals with the same reality which has provoked the theorizings of all the rationalizers since men began to observe the human lot and reflect about it. Respectable as many of these systems are, considered as attempts of earnest men to correlate all that was known about human events, for sociologists they have only the interest of material to be observed. As procedure, as science, they rate with sociologists as negligible except in so far as they bring to light or keep in the light facts which are pertinent regardless of previous theories. From our viewpoint as to the essentials of objectivity, nothing has any claim to our attention which does not proceed from or adjust itself to conceptions of the human reality which gather around these categories of group formation and processes. Everything strictly sociological pivots upon objectively established and precisely characterized group categories. As a practical matter, it is as undesirable as it would be difficult to keep treatment of the categories themselves sharply separated from application of the categories to interpretation of selected social situations.

It must be repeated over and over again that American sociology was, at first, hardly more than a negative movement. Not in spirit, not in purpose, not in prospectus, but in fact. At the start American sociology, always excepting Ward's system, supposed by its author to be in principle complete, amounted in effect to little more than an assertion that all the traditional ways of interpreting human experience were futile. Thereupon sociology became an assertion of intention to invent new and better ways to take the place of old ones. With the exception noted, sociology was not primarily a promulgation of doctrines about society. It was an assertion that better ways must be invented than all the rationalizers about society had practiced in their attempts to understand the fortunes of men in the past, and to point out wise courses for the future. The sociological movement in the United States was principally faith that the needed better ways were discoverable, and gradual transformation of that faith into search for the better ways. Thus what was first scarcely more than a hope for improvement presently became the voluntarily assumed duty of realizing the hope. The movement which we have called "The Evolution of Sociological Consciousness in the United States," has been the partially unconscious effort to discharge this obligation. It is impossible to say how many men, even now, are clearly aware of this vocation. Not by any means all that calls itself sociology has emancipated itself from the old habits of sheer rationalizing, in blissful unconsciousness that, barring happy accidents, objectivity can be arrived at only by systematic use of some specialized intellectual apparatus which establishes credible contacts with reality. Impelled by the desire for objectivity which was our inheritance from the scientific tradition of nineteenth-century social science scholarship, a few men have persisted in making out group categories fit to be tools of more reliable exposition of human experience than had previously been used; or better, group categories which are capable instruments of research into aspects of human experience neglected by previous interpreters; aspects which cannot be ignored without leaving explanations of human experience at an unconvincing stage. The essential part of soci* See American Journal of Sociology, XXVII (1921), 226.