1 66 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
them, which take them out of the range of the special sciences. There are other facts which, when collected, may become the material of coordinate sciences not yet developed. There are kinds of facts which are needed to fill out a complete sched- ule of social knowledge, but might not become the recognized
crve of any special science. Such, e. g., are facts which arc- likely to constitute sanitary science; facts foreshadowing sciences or departments of knowledge about dependents, defectives, and delinquents ; facts about the conditions of labor ; facts about the effect of physical and moral conditions of labor upon all the other elements of life ; facts about the reactions between all the other institutions of society, from the family to the government ; and last, but not least, facts about the judgments and standards of judgment that prevail in the living generation. In these last are the springs of social action. f
It may be said that every kind of fact thus referred to falls within the province of some science other than sociology. Even if this were true, the like might be said of every fact with which the science of medicine has to deal ; yet the professor of the theory and practice of medicine has distinctly different problems from those of anatomist, physiologist, morphologist, chemist, etc. The like is also true of geology, whose facts are the proper material of physics, chemistry, palaeontology, mineralogy, petrog- raphy, etc. The room for sociology is found in the need of making larger combinations of social facts than are proper in sciences which necessarily proceed by abstraction.
It is not true, therefore, that problems of sociology fall within the province of other sciences. Sociology attempts to do what the more special sciences of society have very properly refused to do, viz., it confronts real conditions, while the other sciences deal with abstractions. But while abstraction is a necessary step to knowledge, it is not the final step. So soon as economist, political scientist, moralist, statistician, demog- rapher, or sanitarian undertakes to explain, or in any way to deal with a whole social condition as it is encountered in reality for instance, the relation of a school, a saloon, a trust, a
