Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

  • Sidney Webb
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    30/284 (page 18)
    living or non-living, but the relations found to exist among human beings in their groupings. Such a rela¬ tion can be known and described as such, irrespect¬ ive of the human beings whom it concerns, though not without them. A social institution, it has been well said, “is a mature, specialised, and comparatively rigid part of the social structure. It is made up of persons, but not of whole persons: each one enters into it with a trained and specialised part of himself. ... A man is no man at all if he is merely a piece of an institution: he must stand also for human nature, for the instinctive, the plastic, and the ideal.”1 Such an entity has attributes of its own that can be apprehended and enumerated; it produces effects, directly upon the behaviour of the men and women whom it embraces, and upon other social institu¬ tions, and indirectly, through these human beings, also upon their material, environment. But each social institution is, as a whole, incorporeal or non¬ material—much in the same sense as a biological species is incorporeal or non-material—and can be seen or felt only in particular items which are in all cases only partial manifestations of itself. In its en¬ tirety it can neither be seen nor heard, neither tasted nor touched. If, for instance, a student from Mars 1 Social Organisation, by C. H. Cooley, 1909, p. 319. “An institution is simply a definite and established phase of the public mind, not differ¬ ing in its ultimate nature from public opinion though often seeming, on account of the permanence and the visible customs and symbols in which it is clothed, to have a somewhat distinct and independent existence.” (Ibid.)