THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 7%7
So the "social fact" or the "social process" is not an affair that exists outside of our circle of interests. Our whole life — from our eating and sleeping to our thinking and trading and teach- ing and playing and praying and dying — is a part of the social fact and of the social process. In us the fact and the process has its lodgment. In the fact and the process we live and move and have our being. Instead of not being concerned with them, they are the whole of our concern, so far as we are citizens of the world. We do not know our personal concerns until we see through and through the social fact and the social process.
Moreover, everything that we learn and try to apply as action gets its meaning in its connections with this social fact and social process. For instance, taking parts of school dis- cipline as a sample of the larger whole : what is the good of geographical knowledge? If it stops with geographical facts alone, it is not worth having. Geography is worth studying because it helps to explain the lives of people, past and present, and the possibilities of people in the future. Or why is literature worth studying? Simply and solely because, in the first place, it shows us the inner explanations of the lives of people, past and present, and the internal resources upon which to build their future; then, in the second place, because it imparts to us some of those resources. In studying geography we are, or we ought to be, doing on a broader scale just what the immigrant does, when he scratches the ground where he halts his prairie schooner to see what sort of soil is under his feet. In studying literature we are doing somewhat more disinterestedly and calmly precisely what the lover does when he studies the moods and tastes of his mistress, so as to know how to make successful suit. He is after deep facts of human nature as betrayed in an individually interesting specimen. We are after similar facts of human nature in general.
In other words, we do not know anything until we know it in connection with the social fact and the social process. The things that we think we know are merely waste scraps of infor- mation until they find their setting in this reality, to which all knowledge belongs.
