SOCIOLOGY
116
SOCIOLOGY
ment, type, and place are overcome by progress in
transportation, travel, communication, and industrj',
the process is highly complex. Political institutions,
languages, and race traditions no longer bound the
horizon of t!ie thinker. To-day all states are sub-
merged in the larger view of humanity. All cultures,
civilizations, centuries, all wars, and armaments, all
nations and customs are before the social student.
Origins heretofore hidden are exposed to his con-
fused gaze. Interpretations, venerable with age and
powerful from heretofore unquestioning acceptance,
are swept away and those that are newer are substi-
tuted. Dozens of social sciences flow with torrential
impatience, hurling their discoveries at the feet of the
student. Thousands of minds are busy day and
night gathering facts, offering interpretations, and
seeking relations. The social sciences have become
so overburdened with facts and so confused by vary-
ing interpretations that they tend to split into sepa-
rate subsidiary sciences in the hope that the mirid
may thus escape its own limitations and find help in
its power of generalization. Economic factors and
processes are studied more industriously than ever
iDefore, but they are found to have in themselves vital
bearings other than economic. Political, religious,
educational, and social facts are found saturated with
heretofore unsuspected meanings, which m each par-
ticular case the science itself is unable to handle.
In this situation three general lines of work present themselves. (1) There is the need of careful study of commonplace social facts from a point of view wider than that fostered in each particular social science. (2) The results obtained within the differ- ent social sciences and among them should be brought together in general inteqjretations. (3) A social philo.sophy is needed which will endeavour to take the established results of these sciences and put them to- gether through the cohesive power of metaphysics and philosophy into an attempted interpretation of the whole course of human society itself. Professor Small thus describes the situation: "We need a genetic, static, and teleological account of associated human life; a statement which can be relied upon as the basis of a philosophy of conduct. In order to derive such a statement it would be necessary to complete a pro- gramme of analj-zing and synthesizing the social pro- cess in all of its phases."
On the whole the sociological treatment of social facts is much wider than that found in the other social sciences and its interpretations are consequently broader. \n endeavour is made in following out the social point of view to study social facts in the full complement of their organic relations. Thus, for in- stance, if the sociologist studies the question of woman suffrage, it appears as a phase in a world-movement. He goes back through the available history of all times and civilizations endeavouring to trace the ch.anging place of woman in industry, in the home, education, and before the law. By looking outward to the horizon and backwards to the vanishing point of the perspective of history, the sociologist endeav- ours to discover all of the relations of the suffrage movement which confronts us to-day and tries to in- terpret its relation to the progress of the race. He will discover that the marriage rate, the birth rate, the movement for higher education, the demand for politi- cal and social equality are not unrelated facts but are organically connected in the processes that centre on woman in human society. The student of econom- ics, politics, ethics, or law will be directly interested in particular phases of the process. But the sociolo- gist will aim at reaching an all-inclusive view in order to interpret the entire movement in its organic rela- tions to historical and actual social processes. Like- wise, whether the problem be that of democracy, lib- erty, equality, war, armaments and arbitration, tariffs or inventions, the organization of labour, revo-
lution, political parties, centralization of wealth, con-
flicts among social classes, the sociologist will en-
deavour to discover their wider bearings and their
place in the social proce.sses of which they are part.
The method employed in sociology is primarily in- ductive. At times ethnological and biological methods have predominated but their sway has been diminished in recent years. Sociology suffers greatly from its failure to establish a.s yet a satisfactory basis of classification for social phenomena. Although much attention has been given to this problem the results achieved still leave much to be desired. The general point of view held in sociology, as distinct from the particular point of view held in the special social sciences, renders this problem of classification particularly diflficult and causes the science to suffer from the very mass of indiscriminate material which its scholarship has brought to view. Hence, the process of observation and interpretation has been somewhat uncertain and results have been subjected to vehement discussion. The fundamental problem for sociology is to discover and to interpret coexist- ences and sequences among social phenomena. In its study of origins and of historical development of so- cial forms, sociology necessarily makes use of ethno- logical methods. It resorts extensively to comparative methods in its endeavour to correlate phenomena re- lated to the same social process as they appear in different times and places. The statistical method is of the highest importance in determining quantities among social phenomena, while the prevailing tendency to look upon society from a psychological point of view has led to the general method of psychological analysis. The efforts to develop a systematic soci- ology deductively have not yet led to any undisputed results although the evolutionary hj'pothesis prevails widely. The range of methods to be found among sociologists might be fairly well illustrated among American WTiters by a comparison of the works of Morgan, Ward, Giddings, Baldwin, Cooley, Ross, Sumner, Mayo-Smith, and Small.
In as far as modern sociology has been developed on the philosophical side it has naturally been unable to remain free of metaphysics. It shows a marked tendency towards Agnosticism, Materialism, and Determinism. "He would be a bold man ", says Pro- fessor Giddings, addressing the Amer. Economic Asso- ciation in 1903, "who to-day after a thorough training in the best historical scholarship should venture to put forth a philosophy of history in terms of the divine ideas or to trace the plan of an Almighty in the sequence of human events. On the other hand, those interpretations that are characterized as materialistic . . . are daily winning serious respect." Even when the science has been confined to the humbler role of observation and interpretation of particular social facts and processes, its devotees have been unable to refrain from assumptions which are offensive to the Christian outlook on life. Theoretically, social facts may be obser\'ed as such, regardless of philosophy. But social observation which ignores the moral and social interpretation of social facts and processes is necessarily incomplete. One must have some prin- ciple of interpretation when one interprets, and one always tends towards interpretation. Thus it is that even descriptive sociology tends to become directive or to offer interpretations, and in so doing it often takes on a tone with which the Christian cannot agree.
If, for instance, the sociologist proposes a standard family of a limited number of children in the name of human progress, by implication he assumes an atti- tude towards the natural and Divine law which is quite repugnant to Catholic tlieology. .Ag.ain, when he interprets divorce in its relation to supposed social progress alone and finds little if .any fault with it, he lays aside for the moment the law of marriage given
