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up by the students of particular social sciences and applied in the solution of their special problems. The logical order of progress must be, first, the observation of particulars in many fields; second, the discovery of modes of activity, types of change, and forms of elicitation; and, third, the explanation of special phenomena. Progress of the three kinds will go on simultaneously.
I have not hastened to this conclusion, but in the previous section, when this conclusion was so near, it was postponed, to allow full admission of the fact that much of the importance of the dynamic concept of society can be worked out in the special social sciences, and that, indispensably important as is the exten- sion to social phenomena of the concept of universal process in its application, not only to change, but also to continuity of phe- nomena, yet the method of sociology is not revealed in that con- cept, and has not been discovered until a view of what constitutes scientific explanation has been applied to the explanation of social activities, and we have recognized as the final objects of socio- logical research the forms of relationship in which social activities find their characteristic conditions of rise, continuance, and change. Diversified as are the social phenomena, and undesirable as it is to confuse the fields of existing social sciences, and impos- sible as it may be to regard the social process, viewed only from the side of its results, as affording the appropriate field for a gen- eral science of sociology ; still, so long as the laws of social causa- tion, or, as they may better be called, the modes of activity, types of change, and forms of elicitation, are general to the social process, and not peculiar to the phenomena of the special social sciences, the investigation of social causation calls for a science that brings the whole range of social activity and its eliciting within one horizon and perspective.
At this point it is opportune to reiterate, in conspectus, three salient features of the view thus far set forth.
First : Society is associates associating. Associating cer- tainly includes every kind of action that is not merely physical, or biological, but distinctly human and conscious ; that is, elicited by conditioning relations with associates, and that becomes overt
