Herbert Spencer appreciated the fact that the new science of sociology required an extensive body of materials as a basis for its generalizations. Through the work of assistants he set himself the monumental task of compiling historical and cultural materials not only upon primitive and barbarous peoples but also upon the Hebrews, the Phoenicians, the French and the English. These data were classified and published in eight large volumes under the title Descriptive Sociology.
The study of human societies was too great to be satisfactorily compassed by the work of one man. Besides that, Spencer, like most English sociologists, was more interested in the progress of civilization than in its processes. Spencer's Sociology is still a philosophy of history rather than a science of society. The philosophy of history took for its unit of investigation and interpretation the evolution of human society as a whole. The present trend in sociology is toward the study of societies rather than society. Sociological research has been directed less to a study of the stages of evolution than to the diagnosis and control of social problems.
Modern sociology's chief inheritance from Comte and Spencer was a problem in logic: What is a society?
Manifestly if the relations between individuals in society are not merely formal, and if society is something more than the sum of its parts, then these relations must be defined in terms of interaction, that is to say, in terms of process. What then is the social process; what are the social processes? How are social processes to be distinguished from physical, chemical, or biological processes? What is, in general, the nature of the relations that need to be established in order to make of individuals in society, members of society? These questions are fundamental since they define the point of view of sociology and describe the sort of facts with which the science seeks to deal. Upon these questions the schools have divided and up to the present time there is no very general consensus among sociologists in regard to them. The introductory chapter to this volume is at once a review of the points of view and an attempt to find answers. In the literature to which reference is made at the close of chapter iii the logical questions involved are discussed in a more thoroughgoing way than has been possible to do in this volume.
Fortunately science does not wait to define its points of view nor solve its theoretical problems before undertaking to analyze and collect the facts. The contrary is nearer the truth. Science collects facts and answers the theoretical questions afterward. In fact, it is just its success in analyzing and collecting facts which throw light upon human problems that in the end justifies the theories of science.
2. Surveys of Communities
The historian and the philosopher introduced the sociologist to the study of society. But it was the reformer, the social worker, and the business man who compelled him to study the community.
The study of the community is still in its beginnings. Nevertheless, there is already a rapidly growing literature on this topic. Ethnologists have presented us with vivid and detailed pictures of primitive communities as in McGee's The Seri Indians, Jenk's The Bontoc Igorot, Rivers' The Todas. Studies of the village communities of India, of Russia, and of early England have thrown new light upon the territorial factor in the organization of societies.
More recently the impact of social problems has led to the intensive study of modern communities. The monumental work of Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, is a comprehensive description of conditions of social life in terms of the community. In the United States, interest in community study is chiefly represented by the social-survey movement which received impetus from the Pittsburgh Survey of 1907. For sociological research of greater promise than the survey are the several monographs which seek to make a social analysis of the community, as Williams, An American Town, or Galpin, The Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community. With due recognition of these auspicious beginnings, it must be confessed that there is no volume upon human communities comparable with several works upon plant and animal communities.