METHODOLOGY OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM 131
body of more precisely ascertained facts. It will help us in working for such reorganization of social analysis distinctly to define the purpose which the analysis is to serve. Why do we want to analyze the world of people ? My answer is that we want to know :
1. How does it come about that men's efforts lake the turn they do, when many 0/ them live in company? (This question calls for (a) knowl- edge of the facts of human experience, {b) interpretation of these facts so that both static and dynamic laws appear.)
2. What sort 0/ goal is indicated as the rational social aim by the facts discovered in the world of people? (This question constitutes a demand for social teleology.)
3. To what use may we put the answers to / and 2 in making our efforts go straighter toward the social goal in the future? (This question calls for social technology.)
In other words, we want so to know the world of people that we shall understand it profoundly for the most practical purposes. This being the criterion, we have to examine the so-called social sciences to see if they furnish the knowledge needed. Do they between them successfully analyze the world of people ? Do they furnish the descriptive facts needed for the causal analysis which shall answer the question : How do social facts come about ? or, Why are the facts of human association as they are ?
Proceeding in this way we may take fair account of what the social sciences have tried to do. In this review we shall discover that between them there has been failure to detect and describe facts and relations which seem to be the hyphens and the cement and the cohesive force of the whole. Thus we may make a catalogue of what the social sciences have done, and are trying to do, but this will serve to demonstrate a need of reorganizing social science in general, rather than a satisfac- tory present organization of the social sciences, capable of serving as a sufficient foundation for a constructive system of social aims.
It must be remembered, too, that the division between the world of things and the world of people is not a mathematical line. To know the world of people we must first know that world of things on which the world of people rests, and by which it is constantly influenced. Especially must we know those biological relationships in which the world of things shades ofi imperceptibly into the world of people. We must know those phases of the whole world which can with the least certainty be wholly assigned to the world of things on the one hand, or to the world of people on the other. This is the realm of
