Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/757

Rh occupation with any special class of natural phenomena, no matter how restricted that class may be, yields an acquaintance with the ways of nature that is wonderfully educating in fields far outside of that narrow circle of observation.

This apparently iron-clad law of the study of the sciences, which seems to make such an extraordinary tax upon the sociologist, is therefore, after all, little more than the requirement that the sociological student shall first of all acquire a good general education. It does not so much prescribe the quantity of his learning as the direction it should be made to take. It says that his education should be mainly scientific, that his study of the sciences should be so ordered as to give him a clear idea of their natural relations and dependencies, that they should be taken up so far as possible in the order of their decreasing generality and increasing complexity, and that they be pursued in this direction at least to include the science upon which the chosen specialty directly rests. In case of sociology this is of course to cover the entire range of the sciences, but in reality, this is nothing more than any well organized curriculum necessarily involves, and even the mathematician often goes through the entire course.

It could be easily shown that sociology not only depends upon psychology and biology for its fundamental principles, but that the phenomena of human association would be seriously affected by any modification in the more general laws of the physical universe. Consider how different would be the affairs of men if the angle which the plane of the earth's orbit makes with the ecliptic were considerably greater or less so as materially to affect the seasons. So if the laws of motion, of gravitation, or of light and heat vibration were other than they are the social, and indeed the whole organic world, would be correspondingly different. Chemical phenomena still more closely influence animals and men, and it goes without saying that vital and psychic phenomena are what immediately govern and shape those of the human and social world.

The primary data of sociology, then, are seen to consist of this general preliminary scientific education, this firm grasp of