Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/127

 THE FOUNDERS OF SOCIOLOGY 1 1 5

In order to see how the leading lines of approach to sociology converge in Condorcet's Sketch, it is necessary to examine these lines of approach somewhat more fully.

The characteristic questions of the objective or geographical school of sociology are: (i) What sort of a place is it that a people inhabits as to soil, climate, flora, fauna, etc. ? (2) How do the people get their living by utilizing the resources of the territory they inhabit? (3) What types of character, what varieties of personality, what sort of social relations, can be observed among the people, and what causal relations can be established between these types of character, these social relations, on the one hand, and, on the other, the occupations of the people and their geographical surroundings?

I do not mean to say that these particular questions were asked in exactly this way by Hippocrates, by Aristotle, by Bodin, by Montesquieu, or by Buckle. They certainly were not. It is a commonplace of the history of science that to devise the proper way to put a question takes at least as long a time and as many contributing minds as to answer it. It is only in our own times, in the contemporary school of Le Play, that geographical soci- ology has reached the particular formulation of its own char- acteristic questions indicated above, and this, in its turn, is of course destined to further modifications as sociological experience expands and develops.

It is characteristic of the subjective, or psychological, to reverse the procedure of the geographical : to begin by asking about the individuals that compose a society What is their inner life? By what aims and aspirations are they actuated? What thoughts and feelings govern their lives? These are the first questions, and then is asked : How does the inner life express itself in habit and custom, in laws and institutions, in religion and science, in literature and in art ?

Stated in this way, it is sufficiently obvious and needs no demonstration that there is not only no irreconcilable antagonism between these two great schools of sociology objective, deter- minist, or geographical, and the subjective, psychological, or libertarian but that, in fact, the one is the necessary comple-