THE SOCIOLOGISTS' POINT OF VIEW I 59
army overrunning a hostile country. As fast as we reached these strategic positions we should detail garrisons to hold the territories thus occupied, i. e. t we should detach from the main body of men in pursuit of the inside facts of society special bodies to pursue special phases of facts as parts of the whole body of knowledge which we are seeking.
Suppose still that the army of students, marching and skir- mishing under a clear-headed leader, should keep asking, What are the inside facts of society ? They would presently hit on the discovery that there are a great many facts which manifest them- selves only in individuals, but they are parts of a physical or a psychical process which can be understood only by knowing about reactions with other individuals. Here we should be on the borderland in which individual facts merge into social facts. In other words, we should be asking the questions which prompt men to develop the sciences of ethnology and folk psychology, or social psychology, and history. Again we should discover that there are other facts or realities which do not in like fashion come to light merely in individuals. They have their incorpo- ration in symbols or institutions by which men are controlled. Such realities are language, literature, religions, philosophies, sciences, arts, legal, economic, and governmental systems. In view of these latter realities we should be prompted to ask t he- questions which have been making the sciences of comparative philology, comparative literature, comparative religion, com- parative philosophy (or history of philosophy) and which are likely to make sciences or systems of comparative science, art, jurisprudence, economics, and administration.
A moment's inspection will discover that in all this we should be asking in the first instance historical questions mcrclv. i. e., What have been the facts in these different subdivisions of human reality ? We should not long be content with questions of this sort. In so far as the real still vital we should want
to make examinations of them also at right angles, so to speak, with the historical way of looking at them. We should want cross sections of these various groups of facts philosophies of
