Constructive Rural Sociology (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II DISTINCTION BETWEEN RUBAL AND URBAN COMMUNITY Difficulty of Making the Distinction?It may seem absurd to raise the question of what constitutes a rural community, and what differentiates the rural from the urban community. The common man is likely to feel positive that he knows what the city is, what the country is and what distinguishes each from the other. It appears preposterous that we should not know when we are in the country or in the city and exactly where the boundary line is which separates them. In reality this is very much like the assurance of the popular mind that a man knows himself, his nature, his constitution. For would it not be ridiculous to think that one could live with himself so long without coming to a ripe knowledge of himself? However, to the student of various lines of sciences few things are more familiar than that common facts may prove hard to distinguish and to define for scientific purposes. The difficulty of drawing hard and fast lines between domains appears in classifying the sciences. For example, it is not easy to differentiate between certain phases of history and political science, or between history and economics. The distinction between the sciences rests on the aim and interest of the scientific worker. Investigators of the different sciences often handle the same objects and matter. But since they have different interests to serve they gain different ideas from considering the same things and build distinct systems of knowledge as a consequence. A science is built on the foundation of a particular point of view. Likewise it is conceivable that what would be a city for some intellectual purposes would not be for other purposes. The same is true for the country. There are some aggregations of populations, however, wh...