Common field

“ One cannot bear too much exaltation. After having dwelt awhile among the sublimities of Nature, it is a relief to come down to her more common and familiar aspects; the sunshine is doubly grateful after the gloom of Alpine passes; meadows and groves are more pleasant to the eye than snow-clad peaks; and more sweet to the ear than the roar of mountain torrents, is the murmur of softly-flowing streams. From Lucerne, our way lies over that undulating country which we had surveyed the day before from the summit of the Righi, winding around the Lake of Zug, and ending at the Lake of Zurich. ”

“ They obviously act no otherwise than he who, having studied the forms of a single commonwealth, should set about the composition of a general system of polity; or who, having taken cognizance of the nature of a single field, should imagine that he had mastered the science of agriculture ”

“ There is a general tendency to adopt a broad definition of the province of sociology, to include in the field of investigation all the phenomena of social structure and growth.
But what is the relation of this general social science to the special social sciences—that is, the sciences dealing with special groups of social phenomena, as economics, politics, and jurisprudence? Is sociology anything more than a convenient collective name for the sum of all these? ”

“ The gradation in the changes that mark the social man justifies a corresponding gradation in the traits that distinguish the social aggregate from other aggregates.
The organic concept of society has taught us to look upon mutual aid, division of labor, formation of industrial groups, specialization and exchange with its facilities for communicating and transporting, as the underlying features of society, corresponding to the growing unlikeness of organs and functions, interdependence of parts and unity seen in living bodies. ”

“ Thus conceiving the scope of the science, we saw, on comparing rudimentary societies with one another, and with societies in different stages of progress, that they do present certain common traits of structure and of function, as well as certain common traits of development. Further comparisons, similarly made, opened large questions, such as that of the relation between social growth and organization, which form parts of this same science—questions of transcendent importance, compared with those occupying the minds of politicians and writers of history. ”

“ Such are: the degree of knowledge, and of intellectual and moral culture, existing in the community, and in every class of it; the state of industry, of wealth and its distribution; the habitual occupations of the community; their division into classes, and the relations of those classes to one another; the common beliefs which they entertain on all the subjects most important to mankind, and the degree of assurance with which those beliefs are held ”

“ The organization of society has much to do with the development of the natural resources of any Country or any Land. The institutions of a People, political and moral, are the matrix in which the germ of their organic structure quickens into life—takes root, and develops in form, nature, and character. ”

“ We are slowly beginning to recognize that there may be a science of History, a science of Language, a science of Religion, and, in fact, that all knowledge may be systematized on a common method. The facts of the External Order, which yield a cosmology, are supplemented by the facts of the Internal Order, which yield a psychology, and the facts of the Social Order, which yield a sociology. ”

“ In a broad view, sociology includes politics, economics and ideology. For the purposes of our social analysis, we have divided the field into four separate categories, beginning with politics, continuing through economics and drawing our study together under the general headings of sociology and ideology.
No civilization that we have studied can be regarded as an intentional or projected or planned enterprise. ”

“ Throughout the world for forty centuries the more highly developed societies have always presented under a considerable variety of superficial differences certain features in common. Always at the base of [Pg 67] the edifice, supporting all, subordinate to all, and the most necessary of all, there has been the working cultivator, peasant, serf, or slave. Save for a little water-power, a little use of windmills, the traction of a horse or mule, this class has been the source of all the work upon which the community depends. ”

“ It should be fed to the mind with an intelligent purpose in view, and that purpose should be the preparation of the mind for ultimately entering the last and most difficult as well as most important field of human thought, that of sociology. Therefore history, political economy, and the other generic branches should first be prosecuted as constituting the necessary preparation for the study of the higher ordinal principles. ”

“ Now, as we have seen, sociology occupies itself in the beginning with determining the anatomy of the society studied, with describing its double environment—the external or physical environment (soil, climate, minerals, flora and fauna) , and the internal or human environment (race, population, subordinate human groups) . But further, after the economic function come the other functions which we have already enumerated—genetic, moral, religious, political, etc. ”

“ When men ceased to crowd on each other, they were all willing to adopt ideas and institutions which made the competition of life easy and kindly.
46. The mores of subgroups. Each class or group in a society has its own mores. This is true of ranks, professions, industrial classes, religious and philosophical sects, and all other subdivisions of society. Individuals are in two or more of these groups at the same time, so that there is compromise and neutralization. Other mores are common to the whole society. Mores are also transmitted from one class to another. ”

“ Importance of social environment I take the explanation of the differences that distinguish communities to be this: That each society, small or great, necessarily weaves for itself a web of knowledge, beliefs, customs, language, tastes, institutions and laws. Into the web woven by each society (or rather, into these webs, for each community above the simplest is made up of minor societies that overlap and interlace each other) the individual is received at birth and continues until his death. ”

“ In advanced and complex societies, however, each individual belongs to a number of groups—to a town, a factory, a school, a home, a political party, a fraternal order, a church. In complex societies these groups are united to form the whole social structure. The individual belongs to society, therefore, because he belongs to one or more of the groups composing society, and his membership in society is dependent upon his membership in a social group. ”

“ Thus the formation of society as well as the creation of state, organisation of education as well as the cultivation of letters, the institution of religious practices as well as the foundation of institutions, in fact, all aspects of human life, are influenced and modified by the social and physical atmosphere in which man is placed, and vary with the varying circumstances that diversify it. ”

“ But no steady, safe progress in social organization can be made unless we fully recognize the coordinate value of these three, nor in the science of sociology unless we approach the subject from these three sides. ”

“ Doubtless with longer experience and clearer insight, a definite division of labor will take place according to individual points of view. Some such tendency is already evident. The main point of contention is as to the extension of the term Sociology to include more than the general laws of social structure and evolution. ”

“ THE SCOPE OF SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY 477
a social group which contains within itself, as does the family and the rural community, all the elements necessary to exist- ence the urban community. Here again we find the three necessary factors for a particular branch of science the natural group, the body of experts, the materials of knowledge in the special sciences and in the maxims of experts. ”

“ Wherever a collection of human beings begins to resolve itself into a society, the process involves a tacit agreement that some of the persons in the collection will attend to certain work needed by the society, while others will look after the remainder. If a hundred farmers should happen to buy land in the same township remote from other settlements, these farmers would sooner or later illustrate the change that has gone on with difference of detail, in the development of every civilization or part of civilization. ”

“ In every case it has for its subject-matter the growth, development, structure, and functions of the social aggregate, as brought about by the mutual actions of individuals whose natures are partly like those of all men, partly like those of kindred races, partly distinctive.
These phenomena of social evolution have, of course, to be explained with due reference to the conditions each society is exposed to—the conditions furnished by its locality and by its relations to neighboring societies. ”

“ The scope and method of the mores. In the present work the proposition to be maintained is that the folkways are the widest, most fundamental, and most important operation by which the interests of men in groups are served, and that the process by which folkways are made is the chief one to which elementary societal or group phenomena are due. The life of society consists in making folkways and applying them. The science of society might be construed as the study of them. ”

“ For individual life, while showing us this division of labor, this exchange of services, in many and varied ways, shows it in ways easily traced; because the structures and functions are presented in directly-perceivable forms. And only when multitudinous biological examples have stamped on the mind the conception of a growing interdependence that goes along with a growing specialization, and have thus induced a habit of thought, will its sociological applications be duly appreciated. ”

“ Lastly, the social sciences divide up the phenomena of associated activity and interpret societary institutions and processes, domestic, economic, artistic, educational, ethical, religious, juridical and political. Each and all of these departments of knowledge puts under the microscope a certain section of reality abstracted from the vast sum of reality in which the movements of human society preserve their orbit, and then each tries more or less directly to correlate these details with the whole. ”

“ Association of individuals in a community; (2) division of labor (ergonomy) among the social elements, and a consequent differentiation of structure (polymorphism) ; (3) centralization or integration of the unified whole, or rigid organization of the community. The same fundamental laws of sociology hold good for association throughout the entire organic world; and also for the gradual evolution of the several organs out of the tissues and cell-communities. The formation of human societies is directly connected with the gregariousness of the nearest related mammals. ”

“ The Evolutionary Processes of Society.—Social activity is primarily group activity. Consequently the kind and nature of the group, the methods which brought its members together, its organization and purpose, indicate the type of civilization and the possibility of achievement. As group activity means mutual aid of members, and involves processes of co-operation in achievement, the type of society is symbolic of the status of progress. ”

“ The men who study conditions existing in rural communities which have to do with the real life of the people—the effects of their environment, the tendencies of their habits and customs—will need as thorough preparation for their work, and the result of their efforts will be as useful as that of the men who labor in field and laboratory. ”

“ In the second place, apart from a priori reasoning, this conclusion should be forced on the legislator by comparisons of societies. It ought to be sufficiently manifest that, before meddling with the details of social organization, inquiry should be made whether social organization has a natural history; and that, to answer this inquiry, it would be well, setting out with the simplest societies, to see in what respects social structures agree. Such comparative sociology, pursued to a very small extent, shows a substantial uniformity of genesis. ”

“ If that task can be accomplished, we shall have firm ground from which to take off in the attempt to refer the general characters of the classificatory and other systems of relationship to forms of social organisation. Any complete theory of a social institution has not only to account for its general characters, but also for its details, and I propose to begin with the details. ”

“ The central theme of sociology, as conceived by Professor Findlay and lucidly expounded in this excellent introduction to a comparatively new, extremely comprehensive, but somewhat elusive science, is ‘the definition of social groups, their classification and their relations to each other.’ The treatment is systematic, though some problems of considerable importance, such as the institution of land tenure, have had to be omitted. ”

“ But it will be again objected that society is already highly organized; how, then, can it be said that the science of social organization is of recent origin? How could the principles of social organization be embodied without a knowledge of those principles? ”

“ If we examine every form of human society throughout all ages and countries—whatever be the variety of their organization, government, extent, or duration, or of the kind and degree of civilization to which they have attained—we shall find three types of social position always fundamentally the same, though under very different forms and very differently distributed. ”