Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/758

742 the broad cosmical principles that underlie and govern all departments of natural phenomena. But it is just this, as already remarked, that really ought to be afforded to every member of society irrespective of the field of labor that may be chosen. It is this that furnishes the most valuable of all knowledge, viz., knowledge of the environment. Paradoxical though it may sound, the knowledge of the environment is the most practical and useful of all knowledge, and it should be the principal aim of all sound education to furnish it. But upon this I need not now enlarge.

The more specific data of sociology consist in the facts contributed by the various branches or sciences that fall directly under it, in the relation described in the first paper, of true hierarchical subordination. This is in harmony with the general method of science in proceeding from the concrete to the more and more abstract. The sciences just enumerated are abstract in the sense of abstracting the concrete facts and subordinate laws and dealing only with the highest and most general principles. But such general principles are derived from the less general ones of which they are the generalizations. The subordinate principles are in turn only the expression of orderly phenomena, and such phenomena are only the modes of manifestation of the concrete objects occupying each field. The establishment of these higher sciences is simply a process of generalization from the facts of observation.

In the case of sociology we have first and foremost the concrete fact man. It is absolutely necessary to the study of sociology to study man as a concrete fact. Anthropology, as was shown, is a concrete science, and differs generically from biology and psychology, which deal respectively with the laws of life and mind. It is even more concrete than either botany or zoology, in treating only of one species, or as some think, genus, of living things. So far as man's actions are concerned, especially his rational actions, they fall under psychology, and have already been considered. But the creature man, considered as a material