286 TH$ AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
vegetables or of draft horses would be, if not correlated with larger knowledge. The sociologists represent a protest against this situation. The protest has been long in developing out of the spontaneous, inarticulate stage. It is rapidly finding its voice. The formula which we are emphasizing expresses the implicit assumption of all the sociologists who are to be taken seriously. If they could, they would materially weaken the force of the names used to designate the conventional divisions of sciences pertaining to man. The past and present convenience of these names, and of the academic classifications for which they stand, is counterbalanced by the obstructions which they oppose to the progress of real knowledge. They interfere with discovery that all serious students of society are investigating phases of the same subject-matter. The supreme need in the human sciences at the present moment is to make out what that one subject-matter is, and how the different kinds of research are related to it. This central and circumferential reality appears to the sociologists as the associational process.
Wherever there are human beings there are phenomena of association. Those phenomena constitute a process composed of processes. There can be no convincing science of human life till these processes are known, from least to greatest, in the relation of each to each and to all. Knowledge of human life which stops short of this is at best a fragment, and at worst a fiction. Hence we assert that studies of selected phases of human affairs, no matter how ancient and awful the tradition that sponsors them, are logically in the class of pseudo-sciences, until they take their place within the plexus of sciences which together interpret the whole process of human association.
Men who call themselves by either of the names that signify attachment to either of the traditional divisions of knowledge, are at liberty to define their intellectual interests for themselves, and to shape their individual pursuits accordingly. Thus certain inter- ests may posit a " science " of archaeology ; others, a " science " of epigraphy; others, a "science" of cartography; others, a "science" of numismatology; and so on, up to history and law and economics. Each type of men may cultivate their
