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is in flux; being is process, not fixity. Not alone the immov- able earth spins on its axis and careers around the sun ; the solar system sweeps through space, the fixed stars are not fixed, atoms are systems of interaction, and elements of elements are power. The soul of man we can know only as a concatenation of experi- ences. 17 We are a part of the never-ceasing change. Yet we need not be distraught, nor fear as if we were like land-birds driven out to sea where there is no solid thing to rest upon. Motion itself is fixity, the only fixity. Each atom in its place is more obedient than a Spartan hoplite. The process that we are is inflected into the processes of nature, and the One Force in which all things consist is self-consistent. Society is not an exception to all nature which knows no exceptions. Society is a process. A sociological problem is a glimpse of a process to be traced. As the psychologist does not study thought by describing thoughts that are written down in books, but by a study of thinking of which thought is the function, so the sociologist must be not merely a student of societies, in the popular sense, but a student of associating. Society is associates associating. To know what society is we must know what associating is. In order to render adequate the definition of sociology as " the study of society," it must be recog- nized that the word " society " in the definition is virtually a verbal noun. 18
Whether or not we accept the metaphysic of power in its application to inorganic matter and the sciences of the inorganic, it is sufficiently plain that the sciences of life, at least, are studies of processes. Sociology is a science of life at its highest potency. It can find problems in the static, but not solutions; and cannot understand the problems until it looks upon that in society which seems most fixed as the evidence of a process to be discovered. This discovery is its real task ; these processes are the true objects of the sociologist's attention.
M Wundt, Methodenlehre, Part IV, chap. 2, sec. 40-
w As read in Chicago in the spring of 1902, this declaration closed this section, though, by a change of order, that which here follows had preceded it, except the two paragraphs which now conclude this section. The title then used was, " The Sociologists' Object of Attention." Sees. 5 ff., which will appear in later numbers of this Journal, were not read at that time, and only parts of them were written.
