ology, then, is not opinions which sociologists have arrived at about the realities of human experience. The essential part of sociology is the thought apparatus which sociologists have developed for reaching insights into human experience that entitle them to any opinions at all. In other words, the right of sociologists to recognition as scientists is valid only in so far as the categories which they use, and their manner of using them, enable them to probe at some points deeper into human reality than other techniques have penetrated.

Returning to our point of departure, the one impulse which the early American sociologists had in common was belief that there is such an entity as "society"; that this entity is the inclusive mystery of human experience; that social science, as it had developed up to their time, was an aborted and futile provision for interpreting this mystery, and that the time had come for invention of a science which would be equal to the task in which previous social science had failed. No apology for these enthusiasts is necessary. Their conception of the calling wherewith they were called was grandiose, but they had the courage of their convictions, and they accepted the mandate which they believed to be their commission. The results, so far as results are visible, have been in the first place a radical transformation of the sociologists' conceptions of the reality which they proposed to investigate. This supposed thing, "society," has steadily resisted expression as a thing at all. It has gradually resolved itself into a near-infinity of group relationships and processes. Accordingly, the procedure, the technique, which sociologists have found themselves obliged to invent, has turned out to be mental tools for detecting and interpreting all sorts of group phenomena. Meanwhile sociologists have very greatly modified their conceptions of the relation between their own technique and that of the other divisions of social science. At the same time sociological procedure has differentiated itself into research into numerous distinct phases of group relationships. When we speak of the sociological movement, or general sociology, in the United States, we mean then everything that followed the expression of deliberate and avowed purpose to work for a scientific interpretation of cause and effect in human society at large.

1 See Encyc. Amer., title "Sociology,” p. 215.

In this connection reading of the article "Sociologie" in La Grande Encyclopédie is recommended. It was published in or about 1900. In some respects it presents a better case for sociology than American sociologists had been able to agree upon at the time.

As we have repeatedly urged' from 1883 to the present moment sociology has been a something in the process of becoming. Over and over again, meanwhile, sociology has been defined as though it was, and as though it was destined to remain as it was. In fact, sociology was principally, and most respectably, an earnest attempt to become something, and what it from time to time got to be was covered only in part, and often in least part, by the successive definitions and descriptions. Still less has sociology been finally determined by these antecedent definitions.

At many points in this survey it would have been in order to remark that no "science" has turned out to correspond precisely with advance definitions of the science. It might have been asserted over and over again that sociology is among the most evident cases under this generalization. Long before a few scholars had explicitly declared their dedication to a scientific adventure for which they adopted the name "sociology," there were sporadic attempts in different parts of Europe to construct a "social science," or a "science of society," or (after 1839) a "sociology." In each instance the desideratum of a new social science was advertised along with more or less explicit details as to the constitution of the desired science-what it should be, or what it should do, or both. In no case have the subsequent activities of sociologists conformed very closely, or very long, to the definitions. The substantial reason for this is that science cannot be essentially a thing, it must be essentially a procedure. Science is first endeavor to find out something. Science is secondarily endeavor to set in an order corresponding with their operating places in reality whatever items may be learned about reality. What a science actually is, as it develops, is determined by the nature of the things which it proves possible to find out, by the nature of the things which prove 1 E.g., ibid., under subhead "Description."

2

* A lurid instance is Mr. Benjamin Kidd's article "Sociology" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, referred to below.

to be beyond finding out, and by the procedures that prove to be available for the feasible finding out.

In principle a science is like an exploration of an unknown country. Suppose the survivors of the first winter in Plymouth, instead of being content to struggle longer for existence on Cape Cod, had formed the more ambitious purpose of finding out the geography of the earth's surface in its utmost reach toward the west. We can hardly make our minds in imagination as blank with reference to the experiences that would be involved as the minds of the Plymouth colonists must have been. Let us suppose that before starting to realize their ambition they had composed a definition of the procedure which would supposedly accomplish their purpose. If it went beyond the most non-committal commonplace like "We must go west as far as we can❞—it would begin to be inadequate before an exit had been made from Cape Cod. Suppose their powers of endurance and of achievement had been supported by the miraculous reinforcement which alone would have sufficed to sustain the enterprise. The incidental result would have been that the adventurers' conceptions of the procedure which would actually be involved in the completion of their effort would have been revolutionized before they had covered the first tenth of the distance. Several reconstructions of their conceptions of adequate procedure would have followed before they were within sight of their goal. They would have been compelled to extemporize a technique of locomotion adaptable to all the topographical variations, from meadow brooks to the Mississippi, from seaboard forests to swamp and prairie and desert and mountain. They would have been forced to devise a technique of provisioning, adaptable to the parts of the journey in which they could live from hand to mouth off the country, and to those parts of the journey in which calculation would have to be made for supplies to last, under different climatic conditions, through months of scarcity. They would have been obliged to devise a diplomacy of intercourse with different types of savages, a diplomacy convincing enough to insure themselves against all the antecedent probabilities of extermination. Suppose all this were accomplished. What would be the probable degree of resemblance between the

final account of the actual modus operandi of the trek from Atlantic to Pacific, and the visions of what the journey would be like which occupied the minds of the colonists before they left Plymouth?

No exact parallel can be drawn between this imaginary experience and the features of evolving social science, but in principle the analogy is perfect. If we use the term "science" in the sense of "approximately complete knowledge," not merely in the sense of an orderly arrangement of such makings of knowledge as a certain limited procedure may gather, then science is predetermined by the relations of cause and effect which operate in the reaches of reality in question, not by any definition of scope or method which can be arrived at before those reaches of reality have been explored. For example, whether the "history" of Herodotus or Thucydides is to be classed rather as good reading, from the standpoint of literary critics, or as science, from the standpoint of the modern methodologist, depends upon the degree in which the books respectively have reflected all the different kinds and ratios of cause and effect, as interpreted by all the pertinent rules of evidence, involved in the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars. History, as science, is not merely that reflection of a portion of the past which has been cast upon the mind of a given writer by the particular mirrors which happened to be at his disposal. History as science is reconstruction of past units of experience by use of all the mirrors which reflect any important factors in the given experience, and by correction of all the reflections, and refractions and optical illusions by all auxiliary means at command. In other words, and more literally, history as science is necessarily, in the first place, incessant improvisation of increased accuracy and comprehensiveness in the discovery of evidence, and of increased objectivity in the organization of discoveries reached by the improved methods, especially by correlating historical results with the findings of other techniques.

The like, on the side of method, is the case with each division of social science and with social science as a whole. Speaking now particularly of sociology, it is a humiliating fact that, until now, as a rule, all the sociologists have blandly disregarded this foreordination of nature. In recent years there have been notable exceptions to the rule; but in general the sociologists have dupli

cated the age-old folly of defining their science before they had been taught what their procedure must be by hard experience with their phenomena.

Each of us who has tried to promote development of sociology has had his own doctrine of what sociology will turn out to be when it is developed, and each of us has tried to give that doctrine a share in the elaboration of sociology out of proportion to the share which belongs to docile search into the facts. Gradually, however, reality is prevailing over preconception. In effect, each man's doctrine as to what sociology is has turned out to be a hypothesis as to what sociology may be. Each has attempted to vindicate his hypothesis by using the apparatus which it gave into his hand. The aggregate result has been, first, negatively, demonstration of the futility of an enormous scrap-heap of sociological preconceptions. Then positively the result has been, first, accumulation of an enormous body of insights into actual types of recurrences in human experience; second, visualization of all these recurrences under the aspect of group formations; third, development of a capable but constantly differentiating apparatus of categories for further interpretation of group processes.

The most notable exception to the rule of becoming was Lester F. Ward. Perhaps never in the history of thought has a man in middle life launched a rounded and complete system of doctrine, and lived to be a leader of a company of younger men glad to make that system their point of departure, and for years produced monographs and books in elaboration of his doctrine which all the younger men were bound to study, yet with no more modification of the original structure of his doctrine than Ward ever made in the system proclaimed in his first book. The consequence has been that Ward's work occupies in general sociology very much the place of the Tower among the institutions of London. Dynamic Sociology was such a massive work that it cast a spell over a small group, and then recruits to their ranks, and it held them in an attitude of awe for years, even while some of them were forging

'Cf. "Fifty Years of Sociology in the United States," American Journal of Sociology, XXI (1916), 749 ff.