130 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
snap judgments of former men to be substitutes for processes which we would feel bound to perform before forming judgments of our own. So much for the disadvantage of names. The advantages do not require emphasis here.'
CHAPTER III.
LIGHT ON THE SOCIOLOGICAL PROBLEM FROM THE FOREGOING
DISCUSSION.
These distinctions enable us to see certain facts best expressed in very simple form. Men have looked out upon the world of reality and have instinctively begun the process of descriptive analysis. That proc- ess has very early resulted in a discrimination of the world of things from the world of people. So soon as that distinction was made, analysis pressed on further within each division. Men have tried to analyze both the world of things and the world of people. They have arrived, in the former case, at a descriptive analysis so minute that the world of things is parceled out among a large number of sciences, each devoted to certain groups of things, or to certain properties of things. These sciences have minutely described their several parts of the world of things, and they have, moreover, done much to make out the causal relations both within the things which they study, and between these things and the rest of things. In attempting to analyze the world of people, other men have separated that human world into parts, and have organized divisions of research devoted to groups of people or to certain phases of fact about people. All this we now see is the result of more or less successful efforts to analyze and describe the world of people. Men have gone farther, and have tried to make iraaitz/ analyses of the world of people. These have taken the various forms of social theories, of varying degrees of generality. The credibility of this causal analysis depends in the first instance, of course, upon the exactness and thoroughness of the previous descrip- tive analysis. The present task of the social sciences in general is to review the accepted analysis of the world of people, to criticise the same, and so to reorganize descriptive analysis that the facts shall more precisely appear, and that causal analysis may proceed upon a
' We depart from Wundt's order to take it up again in Part II. Wundt's treat- ment of {a) determination, (b) induction, (c) deduction, deserves equal consideration. It is passed over in this syllabus, because the elements just analyzed have received rela- tively less attention, and there are among the sociologists more obvious examples of fallacy from ignorance of them.
