Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/123

 THE FOUNDERS OF SOCIOLOGY 1 1 1

movement of science, and these, as the century wore on, became more and more the centers of scientific interest. Buffon was an older contemporary, and Lamarck a younger one (by a year only), of Condorcet. His life overlaps the last part of Haller's and the first part of Bichat's. Locke had died half a generation before the birth of Condorcet, but his psychological work was being continued and developed in one direction by Hume and by Kant, in another by Condillac, who himself was an uncle of Condorcet. Quesnai and his fellow-physiocrats had during the boyhood of Condorcet been laying the foundations of a science of economics, which Adam Smith was to continue as his contem- porary. Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748 (its author being then sixty years of age), was passing through edition after edition during the youth of Condorcet. Turgot, a somewhat older contemporary and intimate friend of Condorcet (they stood to one another almost in the relation of master and disciple), was thinking out more clearly than ever before the con- ditions of a science of human evolution in which the geographical and objective factors should have their due place assigned to them alongside the psychological and libertarian factors. This second half of the eighteenth century was, in fact, the time when a synthetic science of society was first being adequately conceived this conception being made possible by that progress in his- torical and scientific investigation out of which were arising as distinct systems of study many of the subsciences of sociology, notably psychology, social geography, comparative history, and philology. And though precise and even specialist knowledge in different departments was being built up, yet the characteristic notes of the scientific mind were synthesis and practical applica- tions. Condorcet himself was trained as a mathematician, and, though a peer of France, yet is to be counted in the early part of his life as a professed mathematician. But even here the syn- thetic and practical character of his mind, as of nearly all eminent minds then, is seen in his efforts to make actual application of his specialism for the benefit of society. The mathematical work he did in applying the formulae of probability to judicial decisions