THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 349
problem is a general problem. We cannot make wise programs without adjusting their relations with the affairs of the world. There are no social solutions which do not rest upon settled relations in society at large.
VII. Coordination or correlation. Disregarding its relation- ships to the other incidents in our schedule, and considering it in itself, we encounter in the fact of coordination that aspect of reality which has thus far furnished more material to political economy than to any other branch of sociology. Indeed, if we are to become as familiar as our present means of knowledge make possible with the phenomena thus designated, economic science is the indispensable interpreter. Not even in political science is the fact of coordination so minutely analyzed. Yet we are left with a partial and unbalanced conception of human associations on the whole if we stop with knowledge of coordina- tion as it is displayed by the industrial or the civic department of human activities. Desire to avoid the extravagances and trivialities of the so-called "biological sociologists" has caused a reaction among cautious students of society, to the extent that they are shy about employing the most obvious organic meta- phors in reporting the more general facts of human coordination. We cannot adequately express the results of already accomplished analysis of human association, however, unless we take advan- tage of terms filled with meaning from lower orders of coordina- tion. There is articulation of parts, there is interlacing of structure, there is intercommunication of persons and of products between activities that proceed within an association. All this complexity is due to various correlating principles, the study of which is perhaps both the "immediate" and the "paramount" task of sociology. We are observing at this stage merely that what we see in other aspects of associations depends upon facts of another order, which are distinguishable in thought by abstrac- tion, whether we have made the remaining generalizations or not. These facts are both structural and functional. The whole sys- tem by which communication of thought and influence takes place in association is a combination of material and spiritual devices, which gives to human associations a coherence and
