THE CONCEPTS AND METHODS OF SOCIOLOGY. 1
To SET forth in a brief paper the fundamental conceptions of any modern science is a difficult task. The difficulty increases as we pass from the relatively simple sciences that have to do with inorganic matter, to the highly complex sciences of life and of mind. And when we come to the phenomena presented by aggregations of living beings phenomena of the interaction of mind with mind, phenomena of the concerted activity of many individuals working out together a common destiny we have a subject for scientific study too many-sided, too intricate, for description in a few comprehensive phrases, and the scientific study itself arrives at fundamental conceptions only after a long and extensive process of elimination. Fundamental conceptions in such a field are necessarily general truths, expressing the rela- tions that endless facts of detail bear to one another, or to underlying groupings, processes, or causes. A brief account, therefore, of the fundamental conceptions of sociology, and of the methods available for the scientific study of society, must remorselessly exclude those concrete particulars that lend to our knowledge of collective life its pre-eminently real its human interest. It must be restricted to conceptions that are ele- mental, general, and in a degree abstract.
Conforming to this necessity, I shall group the fundamental conceptions of sociology in three divisions, namely : first, con- cepts of the subject-matter of sociological study, that is to say, of society ; second, concepts pertaining to the analysis and classi- fication of social facts, and incidentally to the corresponding subdivisions of sociological science; third, concepts of the chief processes entering into social evolution, and of the inferred causes.
The word " society " has three legitimate significations. The
1 An address delivered at the International Congress of Arts and Science, Department of Sociology, September, 1904.
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