ABSTRACT
All social activity which manifests itself in certain material must adapt itself to the laws and inherent characteristics of that material. The forms of political organization and economic production, the law, the arts, and language have laws and a logical development of their own. The method of sociology is like the method of the social sciences, but applied to a field of investigation which is obtained by abstracting the forms of socialization from the total social actuality. It is because this abstraction must precede that in the application of the method there arise difficulties of technique. The complexity of social life and the relative crudeness of the technique of sociology prevent in the present stage a fundamental clarity regarding its basic questions and a perfect validity of its answers. But in many fields of scientific investigation, the so-called foundations are less secure than the superstructure erected upon them.
