THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 797
Between all the men in the known world there is associa- tion. There is the close, constant, firm association of the family group. There is the loose, transitory, precarious association of the world's sympathizers with Dreyfus or Aguinaldo or the Boers. There are associations spatial, vocational, purely spiritual. There are associations as persistent as the Celestial Empire and the Roman Catholic Church, and there are associations that form and dissolve in a day. In short, association can be defined in advance only in a formula which is essentially interrogative, viz., as the fiuictioning of related individuals. This functioning has to be traced out, not merely at the first point of contact between individuals, but throughout the whole chain of relationships of which a particular contact closes the circuit.
Sociologists are accordingly less and less inclined to go through the motions of performing the impossible. Indication, not definition, of subject-matter belongs at the beginning of every inductive process. The task of sociology is primarily to make out the orders of human association, and so far as possible to determine the formulas of forces that operate in these several orders. Association is activity, not locality. Like states of consciousness, it has to be known in terms of process, not in dimensions of space. To make headway with the sociological task we must abandon pretentious a priori conceptions of all sorts, and patiently investigate concrete human associations until they reveal their mystery. Human associations overlap and interlace and clash and coalesce in bewildering variety of fashions. Sociology has at last become conscious of the problem of reducing this complexity to scientific statement of form and force and method.
Once more, recurring to our definition, "Sociology is the study of men considered as affecting and as affected by associa- tion," we may state the general problem of sociology in this among other variations, viz., to make out the proper contetit of the concept social, or associational. We will for convenience use chiefly the shorter synonym. We mean that the proximate task of sociology is so to analyze and then to synthesize the contents of associations, as such, that our abstract notion "association,"
