294 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
program that begins and ends with details as "scientific." His- toriography as such is not science ; it is merely a technique. The output of that technique is raw material of science. There is no more scientific value in knowing merely that William the Con- queror, or William the Red, or any of their successors in past centuries, did this or that, than there is in knowing what Edward VII. and the Kaiser did on their yachts at Kiel last summer. We do not reach science till we advance from knowl- edge of what occurred to knowledge of the meaning of what occurred. On the side of the meanings of occurrences, whoever follows connections as far as they can be traced, whether he calls himself historian or sociologist, pursues the essential sociological interest. 7
1 Tarde charges both historian and sociologist with attention to the particular in disregard of the general. For instance, he says that physicists, chemists, and physiologists " show us the subject of their science only on the side of its charac- teristic resemblances and repetitions ; they prudently conceal its corresponding heterogeneities and transformations (or transsubstantiations)." He then alleges a contrast in the case of the social sciences as follows : " The historian and sociolo- gist, on the contrary, veil the regular and monotonous face of social facts that part in which they are alike and repeat themselves and show us only their acci- dental and interesting, their infinitely novel and diversified, aspect. If our subject were, for example, the Gallo-Romans, the historian, even the philosophical his- torian, would not think of leading us, step by step, through conquered Gaul in order to show us how every word, rite, edict, profession, custom, craft, law, or military manoeuvre, how in short every special idea or need which had been introduced from Rome, had begun to spread from the Pyrenees to the Rhine, and to win its way after more or less vigorous fighting against old Celtic customs and ideas, to the mouths and arms and hearts and minds of all the enthusiastic Gallic imitators of Rome and Caesar. At any rate, if our historian had once led us on this long journey, he would not make us repeat it for every Latin word or grammatical form, for every ritualistic form in the Roman religion, for every military manoeuvre that was taught to the legionaries by their officer-instructors, for every variety of Roman architecture, for temple, basilica, theater, hippodrome, aqueduct, and atriumed villa, for every school-taught verse of Virgil or Horace, for every Roman law, or for every artistic or industrial process in Roman civiliza- tion that had been faithfully and continuously transmitted from pedagogues and craftsmen to pupils and apprentices. And yet it is only at this price that we can get at an exact estimate of the great amount of regularity which obtains in even the most fluctuating societies." The Laws of Imitation ; English by Parsons, New York, 1903, pp. 8, 9. Whether Tarde is right or not in grouping historians and sociologists equally under this censure, our point is substantially the one that he makes : viz., that knowledge does not pass from scraps into science until its regularities are recognized and their laws discovered. The sociologists rather than the historians are making the fight for use of this theorem in the social sciences.
