Sociology and Modern Social Problems

What is Society? — Perhaps the great question which so-ciology seeks to answer may be this question which we have put at the beginning. Just as biology seeks to answer the question "What is life?"; zoology, "What is an animal?"; botany, "What is a plant?"; so sociology seeks to answer the question "What is society?" But just as biology, zoology, and botany cannot answer their questions imtil those sciences have reached their complete development, so also sociology cannot fully answer the question "What is society?" imtil it reaches its final development. Never-theless, some conception or definition of society is necessary for the beginner; for in the scientific discussion of any problem we must know first of all what we are talking about. Before we can study the social problems of to-day from a sociological point of view, then, we must imderstand in a general way what society is, what sociology is, and what the relations are between sociology and other sciences.