Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/39



Rh Now the pedagogic principle alluded to is that none of the more complex and less exact sciences can be properly understood until after all the simpler and more exact ones below it have first been acquired. What Comte insisted upon was that no one was competent to treat the higher sciences who was ignorant of the lower, and the same would of course be true of teaching. But the important qualification should be made that this canon does not imply a mastery of the details of these sciences, but only a comprehensive grasp of their principles. Thus qualified I believe it to be sound, and it is very important to set it forth at such a time as this when mathematicians, astronomers, and physicists, having no acquaintance with biology, psychology or sociology, are setting themselves up, on the strength of their reputation in the simpler fields, as authorities on economics and social and political science. And not less forcibly is the truth of this principle exemplified in those economists who almost boast that they know nothing of biology and the other great sciences from which the broadest principles of their own department are derived.

We see, then, the high place which sociology, properly defined, should hold among the sciences, and how clear and incisive are the boundaries which mark it off from all other branches of learning. It is the cap-sheaf and crown of any true system of classification of the sciences, and it is also the last and highest landing on the great staircase of education.