Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/41

 GOLDENWEISER] A NEW APPROACH TO HISTORY 29

Moreover, the student of human history has a marked advantage over the historian of nature in so far as the former's record is defi- nitely (or relatively definitely) chronologized.

It seems time to pause here, as the formulations toward the end of the chapter contrast strongly with the professions in the opening pages and the preface. We were told that the method of science was to be applied to human history, but further reading shows that the "method of science" is to be the method of the historic branches of the natural sciences, astronomy, geology, biology; for it will be admitted that these sciences have also non-historical aspects, a statement to a degree applicable also to the sciences of society. Nor is this all. The terms "scientific" and "scientific method" have acquired some of their most current connotations from their associ- ation with the so-called exact sciences, such as physics, chemistry, mathematics, or that mathematical branch of astronomy known as celestial mechanics. Scientific method in most general terms has thus come to mean one of two things: either I, problem-working- hypothesis-experimentation (under controlled conditions). Accept- ance or rejection of hypothesis-theory (sometimes designated as "principle" or "law") ; or 2, theoretical formulation of a scheme or system of magnitudes, forces and correlations which, when applied to the interpretation of a particular, more or less complex set of facts and relations, proves a means of simplification or at least of consistent statement (this latter method being used in such sciences as theoretical physics and in some branches of celestial mechanics). Now, while some advocates of eugenics have proposed and to a degree carried out experiments, somewhat after the nature of the first of the above methods, whereas the second has been weekly adumbrated in some of the hypothetical constructs of modern ethnological difTusionists, all in all, there is no room in social sci- ence for either of the two characteristic "methods of science." However that may be, these methods are obviously out of court when one deals with the historical aspects of society or with the historical branches of such natural sciences as astronomy, geology or biology. If one further inquires for the particular method of the natural-historical sciences which the author would attempt to

�� �