Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/779

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SOCIOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION LINES 763

as the constant function of regular and unintermittent activities. Emphasize the dynamic side as we will, yet it remains true that no process can be studied unless it " amounts to something." In more scientific phrase, a process can be identified only by its effects. Have we discovered any new kind of effects, or is it only that the familiar social sciences have been studying effects with inadequate attention to the processes of which they are the expres- sions, and that we have merely come to a more adequate realiza- tion that the fact of process characterizes social phenomena as it does other phenomena? Have we discovered a new kind of process, or merely come to realize that what we have been looking at all along was process, though we did not know it; that the very substance of these phenomena which we have been describing and trying to account for is the process that perpetually brings them forth ? It need not daunt us to think that this view may require the familiar social sciences to undergo as complete a transformation as that which overtook the science of natural history, when it was reconstructed into biology by the transfer of attention to the study of processes. Ernst Haeckel for the physical scientists, and Wilhelm Wundt for the mental scientists, have said that, as the material sciences have had their blossoming- time in the nineteenth century, so the sciences of which sociology is the type, if not the sum, may be expected to have their blossoming-time in the twentieth. Before such prophecies can be fulfilled, long and wide avenues of further advance must be discerned. And it is not excessive optimism to hope that they will appear by the light of the dynamic conception of social phenomena. The candid admission that the social process shows its most important results in the fields already occupied by such sciences as economics, politics, and ethics, is not the same as saying that all existing phenomena have been adequately studied even by the static and " descriptive " method. Moreover, when the dynamic conception of social phenomena becomes habitual, it may be expected to lead to a shifting of appraisal such that facts hitherto regarded as relatively negligible will be seen to be important, and such that added to the present list of social sciences there may be one or more devoted to the study of social