Chapter XII

The Problem Restated

In Parts II and III we have run two trial surveys over the general field of sociology, but its contour is little plainer than it was in the beginning, and we find ourselves again at the point from which we started.

In chap. 6 we said that the problem of sociology is to compose our scattered views of society into a truthful composite picture. We have examined two outlines of composite pictures of society, and have found that there is truth in them, or that they suggest truth, but that they are far from satisfying our demand for a literal account of human relations.

Criticism of these two proposals in solution of the sociological problem has made demands for more specific analysis and description and explanation. For example, we have lost confidence in the utility of the word " society," that has given sociologists so much trouble. The term has such persistent structural—i. e., statical—associations that it starts us with false presumptions. The more we use the term, the more it seems to stand for a fixed species of some sort—a definite arrangement of quantity, size, and structure. But, in spite of ourselves, when we make active search for the phenomena and laws of "society," we examine many "societies" of different forms, structures, sizes, qualities; and we find ourselves at fault when called upon to locate the society par excellence with reference to which we posit our problem.¹

We speak of the family as society, and again we refer to the human race as society. Every intermediate group of people may also be denoted by the same term. Thus the very word by which we attempt to determine our problem becomes an ignis fatuus. It flies so uncontrollably from one aspect of. humanity to another; we not only waver in our faith that the problem may be solved, but, if the truth must be told, we sometimes wonder whether, after all, a real problem exists. Is not this "society" a veritable will-o'-the-wisp? Is it' not a fabric of the imagination? Is it not whatever we please to make it, instead of something actual and tangible?

Questions of this sort have led to the perception that human experience is the real mystery which we are trying to solve. We have seen, further, that human experience is not a thing, nor a species of things. It is relationships between persons and the world they occupy. It is activities that have connections of cause and effect with each other. It is processes linked together into compound, and doubly compound, and nthly compound processes. In short, if we make human beings the center of our inquiry, and refer to the rest of the universe merely in so far as it conditions the activities of human beings, we find that the mystery reduces itself to the process of human association from its minutest to its largest phenomena.²

This shifting of attention from "society" to "human association" is not a mere verbal change. It marks real progress in discovery.

In the first place, it repudiates an a priori element that clung to the concept "society." That term connoted arbitrary extensions, or limitations, or qualifications, which continually seduced sociologists into profitless dialectics. It begged questions—such, for instance, as the extension of human relationships, the kind and degree of human unity. ³

In the second place, this transfer of attention from "society" to "human association" throws down the artificial : barriers between investigators of different phases of human experience. If there is unity of any sort between men and events, the probability is that, whenever we begin to investigate the processes of association, we shall sooner or later come upon whatever likeness there is to other processes of association, and whatever nexus there is between one process and another. At the same time, we are freed from all assumptions that bind us to theories of likeness or other relation, if it does not exist.

In the third place, although we may not presume that this step carries us beyond liability to error in explaining human experience, it certainly marks a departure from analogical methods of dealing with our subject-matter, and by so much an approach to scientific precision. For instance, we may have been perfectly aware of the provisional character of the theorem, "Society is an organism." We may have used it. with decent mental reservations. Yet so long as that formulation of the matter to be explained controlled our view of the task involved, we were at a disadvantage. It is like clearing the decks for action to advance beyond use of that pedagogical, symbolic theorem, and to propose the analytic .questions: What and how and why are the real processes that occur when two or more people associate? The answers to these questions will include all that we can ever scientifically ascertain about the meaning of human experience.

Attempts to interpret human experience in terms of the structure and functions of society have, still further, forced us to take human individuals literally. We have had to abandon, one after another, fantastical interpretations of society, in which individuals figure merely as so much material in course of cosmic evolution, or so many cogs in a social machinery, or so many cells in living social tissue. Individuals are not to be disposed of in either of these summary fashions. The philosophical concept " individual" may baffle us forever.⁴ Since the individual encountered in experience is the ultimate term in the associational process, sociologists and psychologists have been compelled to make common cause with each other in determining his meaning traits. Of what sort is this individual, by whom the social process is. made, who nevertheless could not exist except as a consequence of the social process?

Without pretending to speak with scientific accuracy, in plain words our task in explaining human experience is to understand the ways in which everyday people act under the different circumstances in which their lot is cast. We know that plain people feel wants. They act in hope of satisfying their wants. We easily find that all the wants which plain people have ever betrayed make up demands for satisfaction which nay be put together in a very few groups. The decisive element in the wants in each of these groups may be discovered without much trouble. Starting with the clue that plain people, judged by what they want and the means at their disposal for getting it, are essentially the same, whether they live in primitive caves or in modern palaces, and that the world around them is constant in essence, however varied in circumstance, we find that our task is to discover, in every phase of association which we try to explain, on the one hand the specific type of the constant genus homo concerned as active agent, and, on the other hand, the specific variations in his surroundings which both limit and stimulate his wants. Otherwise expressed, human experience is always a mesh in a web of causes and effects, in which persons, in the elements of their nature changeless, in the manifestations of their character infinitely variable, mingle with each other in the exercise of their qualities. In this association they encounter constant : variations of circumstances, both in each other's attitude and in physical surroundings. At the same time, all experience reacts upon the development and assortment of the rudimentary factors combined in the individuals. The infinitely diverse phenomena of human association are thus particular situations presenting peculiar variations and combinations of the same fundamental elements; viz.: the physical universe; human wants; combinations of these wants in individuals;⁵ contacts between individuals, each pursuing purposes given by his wants; conflicts or correspondences of the purposes of the associated individuals; adjustments of the individuals to each other in accommodation of their purposes; consequent union of effort producing new situations, which in turn become conditions for another cycle of the same series, each term having a content somewhat varied from that in the previous cycle, the process continuing beyond any assignable limit.

For example, the Hebrews in Egypt wanted generically the same "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" for which the signers of the American Declaration of Independence were ready to fight. Their specific want was escape from their Egyptian task-masters. No sooner was this accomplished than the wanderers in the wilderness were different people from the slaves in Egypt. In different surroundings, their economic, social, political, and religious wants underwent change, and their activities manifested new phenomena. Again, when they ceased to be nomads and established permanent settlements, another similar cycle began. Each generation in a way accomplishes some portion of such a cycle of social cause and effect. Some of the elements of the process begun by the Hebrews in Egypt worked through the whole process of the Christian centuries, and entered into the motives of the American colonists, to make their action so different in detail from that of the insurgent Semites. The same process has made the Americans of today, in pursuit of "life, liberty, and happiness," seek.the merit system in the civil service, and electoral reform, and combinations of labor and capital, and a limitless program of universal education.

All of these facts have had an influence upon social theorists. They also necessarily feel somewhat modified demands for explanation of the facts which put on aspects not visible to earlier theorists. Accordingly, the problem that presents itself to sociologists today cannot be expressed in terms that sufficed a generation ago. Our present demand is.for a way of explaining what is taking place among people, with literal values for the different terms which we find concerned in human experience. We want an explanation, not of men's crystalline formations, not of their machineries, not of their institutional remains. We want an account of the intimate process of their lives, in terms that will assign their actual meaning and value to the chief and subordinate factors concerned in the process. We want especially an explanation that will guarantee its proportional place to the factor human purposes. We want to know all that can be discovered, from the most particular to the most general, about the laws of relationship between the physical surroundings, individual endowments, social environments, specific purposes, interrelations of purposes, collective achievement, and the reaction of achievement on the conditions of subsequent cycles of effort and result. No larger contribution to explanation in this spirit has been made than that of Ratzenhofer.⁶

Perhaps the most conspicuous sample of ilusion in this connection is Tarde's abstraction " socicty." 'It proves to be "those relationships between men which are made up of imitation." We shall return to the subject in Part VII.

Notes