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of a community or a nation is accounted for solely by hypotheses of qualities within its members, the fact and the force of asso- ciation are virtually ignored. With this concept in mind, on the other hand, we are bound to ask : What have the associates of the boy or the men or the nations to do with their acts ? The result is that we find a ground for familiar proverbial wisdom of all times and peoples; e. g., "Evil communications corrupt good manners;" "A man is known by the company he keeps;" "Cherchez la femme" etc.; i. e., whatever our philosophy, we have always in practice looked for some part of the reasons for people's acting in other people. The boy in the slums may give no more real evidence of depravity than the boy on the boulevards, but the difference of his associates, young and old, turns the scale. The men who dodge taxes in New York or Chicago may be in themselves no worse than other men, but they may have a belief that other men turn the public revenues to private benefit, and that still other men in other parts of the state escape burdens that are loaded on the cities. Their tax-dodging may be no more praiseworthy ; but, instead of being an act of unmitigated mean- ness and unsociability, we find it has an element at least of self-defense and quite natural if not justifiable retaliation. So England's inertness in the face of Turkish atrocities proves to be less from English indifference than from Russia's watchfulness of opportunity, and vice versa. In a word, all human facts, from those most narrowly individual to those which concern the whole living population of the world, are to be understood fairly and fully only as phases of the larger ranges of facts with which they are associated.
5. The social. With this term we denote a concept which is less directly available outside of technical sociology than those which have gone before, and most of those which will follow. For the professional sociologist, however, it is a matter of cardinal necessity to find for this concept a distinct and clear content. If he is confused or vague at this point, his whole soci- ology will be a blur in consequence. The concept has been dis- cussed incidentally, however, in earlier papers of this series, and reference to those passages is sufficient for our present purposes. 1
1 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Vol. V, pp. 784-8 and 796-802.
