THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 517
as economic. In the latter we have contacts inspired by differentiating impulses. Our classifications of associations in the economic state must be in accordance with the functional relations of the associations to the economic end. Such classi- fications, both genetic and morphologic, are already worked out to a very nice degree of precision in economic science. Now let us assume that we have grand divisions of economic states in accordance with no matter what accepted principle.
For the sake of clearness let us suppose that classifications of economic activities are reduced to the same forms which we have presupposed in the cases of anthropology and ethnology, i. e., to type, class, order, species, subspecies, variety, etc. Thus we might make out four types of economic association, J, K, L, M, distinguished, we will say, by hand-to-mouth economy, provident economy, intensive economy, and humanitarian economy. Each of these types might include classes/, k, /, and m, distinguished by the kind of natural resource primarily culti- vated ; each class in turn might include the orders/', k\ l\ m 1 * determined by the organization of labor force within the society say between production, transportation, exchange, and nonpro- ductive activities, etc., etc. Now, these economic activities are carried on by people, and wherever there are people the anthro- pologist and the ethnologist find material for their abstractions. Our present aim is to make the proposition as monotonous and commonplace as possible that the analyses of each of these and coordinate specialists deal with abstractions, and that we run into fatal fallacy when we begin to accept them as bases for classification of societies themselves. In every association the people have ethnic relationships and anthropologic peculiarities. These ethnic and anthropologic variables may or may not con- stitute differentiating factors in the economic state. If they do not, the associations within the economic state should evidently be classified just as though the people composing them were per- fectly similar and homogeneous. That is, the groups within the economic state, and the divisions and subdivisions within the groups, will turn primarily upon economic differences.
It thus becomes a question of fact, in the case of any particular
