THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 531
potent to constitute differentiating traits of the states them- selves. These factors also constitute cardinal traits of the states. While the civic and economic interests are foremost in the pub- lic mind, ethical elements which form the setting of these inter- ests are decisive within certain limits. These ethical elements establish a standard of life to which the civic and economic elements must conform. While these ethical factors in the indi- viduals are not so powerful that they change the visible type of states from the "economic" or the "civic" to the "ethic," they vary to such a degree that there are obvious qualitative differ- ences in the economics and the civics of these states. It may prove impossible so to formulate these ethical traits and to determine them as differentia of these variations that they can be made bases of tenable classification. Nevertheless we pro- pose to make the experiment of adopting the length and breadth and depth and height of the ethical conceptions which fix the orbit of state activities, as the points of departure from which to describe and classify states and the minor associations partly or wholly within states. Probably no one now living will survive to see citizens of the leading states subscribe general assent to graduation of those states upon this basis. Quite likely we shall succeed with this device merely in classifying activities, not states at all. If so, we shall certainly not have gone backward scientifically, for, as we have seen, all that the social sciences have accomplished by way of classification so far proves to be a graduation of activities, not of associations. We shall cer- tainly have grouped the activities of states with reference to a more comprehensive conception of the relations affected by the activities. We shall have related them to a larger whole. We shall thus have attempted at least to make out their meaning as functions of a universal that is closer than the circumference of these minor motions to the absolute social reality.
ALBION W. SMALL.
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
(To be continued.}
