1 16 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
gramme. 1 refrain from the assertion, and simply say that we dissi- pate our energies if we fail to recognize the unity of our subject-matter. The object of human knowledge is not many "subjects," but one cosmos. That cosmos, as I have said, is composed of a world of things and a world of people. This world of people is in turn a unit. For convenience we divide it into parts, but we delude ourselves unless we keep ourselves conscious that those parts are all actual mem- bers of the social whole. All observable reality that does not belong to the world of things belongs to the social realm. It is either men, or men's groupings, or men's workings. Whether we study men's bodies, or their tools, or trades, or arts, or foods, or clothes, or houses, or wars, or games, or words, or prayers, or oaths, or songs, or books, or laws, we are studying phases of the one social fact. We are all studying one thing, whether we call ourselves students of language, or literature, or ethnology, or history, or psychology, or philosophy, or aesthetics, or theology, or economics, or civics, or sociology. Our sub- ject-matter is the world of people, its conditions, its elements, its forms, its processes, its products. We falsify this world at the start, unless we study our portion of it in conscious recognition of its place in the unity.
The number of facts observable in the world of people is so enor- mous that, from the beginning until now, the rule has been for stu- dents of human facts to get so overwhelmed by the mass of facts within some one section of the world of people that they have never developed a sense of the proportions and unity of human society. They have been like Yankee Doodle. They could not see the town for the houses. Consequently, the world of people has been to them either a vast, senseless confusion, or it has been a little oasis of order surrounded by a wilderness of chaos. For illustration of the latter case I would cite those expounders of religions or literatures who have supposed themselves to understand their abstraction of social facts, while they were ignorant as babes about all the rest of the civili- zation in which the religion or the literature had its setting : within which alone either can be seen in its real meaning. I would cite those expounders of economics or politics who imagine that either of these groups of abstractions from the facts that make up a society can be known as they are without relating each objectively, not only to the other, but to the natural environment, the domestic institutions, the aesthetic standards, the social traditions, the intellectual attainments, the religious beliefs, and the moral codes of the society concerned. Above
