496 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
Labor parties. In their knowledge associations they may form other groups around certain more or less learned publications that enter some of the homes, or the grange, or the university-exten- sion center. Their beauty associations may be confined to cer- tain cooperations with the artistic departments of the state or county fair, or the support of a singing school or a village- improvement society. In Tightness associations they may arrange themselves visibly in a score of religious connections, or lodges, or fraternities ; while in actual types of conduct, in the real moral tendencies that they promote, they may be distributed among a hundred varieties of action from those that are sur- vivals of the predatory state to those that anticipate the mil- lennium.
What resort is open, then, if sociology is to advance beyond the "game, vermin, and stock" order of classification ? It is, of course, Ihe-majestt toward the sovereignty of tradition, but the truth must be told that, tried by the tests of serious logic, the categories in current use in the social sciences hardly rise above that amateur grade. Sociology has nothing to gain by conceal- ing the perplexities which we at once confront when we try to get better categories. It surely looks as though we had formu- lated, in the abstract, a set of problems and a program of inves- tigation impossible in the concrete. If we are counting on quantitative knowledge as precise and extensive as that of phy- sics and chemistry, these doubts are amply justified. If, however, we appreciate the value of qualitative knowledge ; if we recognize the importance and utility of more profound and accurate insight into all the regularities manifested by human associations; we are very far from having exhausted our means of search. The cate- gories which we have indicated will be available both in extend- ing and in enriching social science. Without waiting for the development of the new sciences suggested below (p. 499) , we may make qualitative analyses of actual associations. We may discover more and more precise laws of the adjustments that take place beween persons when one or other of the desires is evi- dently foremost. We may also in many cases determine the order of rank and force among the other desires represented by
