Sociology

The Elemental Occupations.

The social monographs of Le Play which have exerted a marked influence in re-orienting Po litical Economy in a sociological direction, were themselves ante cedent to his later and more mature work upon the primary occu pations. In the elemental activities of Hunting, Herding, Mining, Woodcraft, Agriculture and Fishing, which primitively and per ennially link Man with Nature, Le Play and his continuators (notably De Tourville and Demolins in France, and Patrick Ged des in Britain), discovered material for the renovating of sociology (though Le Play himself never used that word) extending far beyond the purview of anthropology, economics and social geog raphy. Le Play's original formula of Lieu, Travail, Famille, used in the study of these nature occupations, has grown into the Place, Work, Folk, of a school at once observational and inter pretative, which pushes on from "field" studies of the simpler peoples into the most elaborate urban and rural phenomena of civilization.

But, to study these nature-occupations on the spot, most stu dents will not need to go further afield than to the more moun tainous regions of their own country, such as the moorlands, glens, forests and estuaries of the Welsh, Scottish and Irish Highlands, or even to the English Pennines. In the course of a walking tour down a typical valley of these regions one can usually see something both of the nature-occupations and of their mode of family and folk life, and how these are conditioned by en vironment. Picture for instance the appearance of a typical valley as seen, for example, from an aeroplane. On the broad hill-tops, bare rock or moss-grown surface alternating with scrub, heath and bracken, the whole affording scanty food and cover for game, of which the grand source is in the deciduous forest below, shel tering a rich variety of animal life; next is the belt of upland pasture with its wandering flocks; below this the agricultural belt ranging from the poor hill-side croft onwards through the rich farms of the plains, to the market gardens on the outskirts of the great city at the river mouth. Finally, at the estuary is the region of the seafaring folk. Here are four characteristic areas, and the addition of the coniferous forest and mining belts on the western slope altogether make up, as it were, a six-square chequer board. On their respective squares stand the sextet of occupational types, Miner, Woodman, Hunter, Shepherd, Peasant, Fisherman, each ready for his part in the interplay of the rural drama, which con stitutes the subject matter of the rural survey.

Pursued systematically, such an investigation is a Rural Survey of genuinely scientific type. If the student pauses to specialize on its environmental aspects, the study becomes social geography; if on aspects of work, it becomes economics; if on folk life and cus tom, anthropology. Thus these three large sub-sciences of the social group fall into orderly relation to each other and to the facts under investigation. Attempts to co-ordinate these more deter minist or objective sciences (social geography, economics and an thropology) give rise to sociology in its more determinist and objective sense.

The

Civic Survey.—Now the typical river valley that con stitutes the unit of open-air survey, pursued in the Le Play tra dition, has, of course, its towns or cities at "nodal" points, and often its great city at the river mouth. In the survey of these towns and cities, the central interest is not nature-occupations, but culture occupations, commonly called vocations. On the more

social side, it is not family and folk custom that we emphasize, but the group of people associated for some immaterial purpose (as of religion, political progress, science, literature, art, etc.). Such a group becomes an institution, when lastingly organized. And the word "Polity" may conveniently denote all such groups alike the more and the less permanently organized. In the higher forms of city life, polities largely determine vocation; young men (and, increasingly, young women) choosing careers in relation to the polities with which they are associated. Vocation freely chosen usually results in a development of personality which produces some form of art, and thereby transforms "place" (environment) in terms of purpose. Thus the Civic Survey supplements the Rural Survey and in the former the terms and sequence of the formula used for observation and for interpretation are—Polity —3 Culture —> Art. And this, manifestly, is the formula of the rustic survey reversed, and read as Folk--AVork —*Place, but with more appropriate civic terms replacing those of the rustic formula. Pausing in the civic survey to specialize on polities, we are from one point of view studying Ethics, and from another (speculative) Polities; specializing on cultures (as embodied in militant types of personality), we study from one point of view History (as Biography) from another, Social Psychology (the "Ethology" of J. S. Mill) ; specializing on studies of environ ment transformed to art, our sub-science is Aesthetics. Thus do the more subjective or "idealistic" social sciences take orderly rank in the scheme.

Sociology in its more subjective aspect emerges as the endeavour to co-ordinate these. Rustic surveys combine with civic surveys to make the Regional Survey (i.e., systematic study of the various human societies inhabiting a given region). And as such surveys proceed city by city, region by region, their comparison and gen eralization should yield a unified social science with adequate and orderly basis of fact. Amongst the advantages claimed for this method are: (I) it supersedes the old-standing dispute between the "sciences" and the "humanities" by bringing them together as the more objective and subjective approaches to the one single study of social life in evolution; (2) it continues the concrete open air method of Nature Study into the human field, thus finding its material in the objects of everyday observation, and putting the student face to face with these, and only falling back on books and classroom work as a secondary aid; (3) it parallelizes the social with the biological sciences, not through the old vague "or ganic analogy," but by precise correspondence of the elemental concepts in each order of science. Place, work, folk, are mani festly the social equivalents of the biologist's elemental triad, en vironment, function, organism. The biologist, as his observations ascend the scale of life, sees organisms decreasingly hammered into shape by environment, and increasingly modifying environ ment in terms of their own vital activities. * So also the social student reverses his determinist formula in passing from rustic to civic surveys, and adapts its terms to the observation and in terpretation of life, individual and social, increasingly impelled towards the expression and realization of ideals: