Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/129

 THE FOUNDERS OF SOCIOLOGY 1 1 7

vague and general way it is a thought that precedes St. Augus- tine's time by many centuries. It is, indeed, worked out with some fulness and in very different ways in Polybius, in Lucretius, and in others. What gives a permanent place to the Sketch in the literature of sociology is that there, for the first time, the historic approach makes a scientific junction with the utopist The his- torical sociologist looks to the past ; the utopist sociologist looks to the future. When these met, as in St. Augustine, it was on grounds of religion. If they could be said to have met at all in other cases, it would have been on grounds of ethics (Plato's Republic), of politics (Campanula's City of the Sun, Harring- ton's Oceana}, or in poetic conceptions (as in Moore's Utopia).

In Condorcet's Sketch the historic unites with the utopist approach on the common ground of science. There are three master-ideas underlying the Sketch. The first relates to the present, the second to the past, and the third to the future. The fundamental position is the postulation of the sciences as giving us a system of verifiable knowledge of contemporary sociological phenomena. The questions, What is man? What is society? What are their structures and functions? How do they work? these questions have to derive their answers from science. And that is tantamount to saying that the answers have to be derived from those sciences and other studies out of which the objective and the subjective sociologies are built up. The structures and functions thus revealed have to be accounted for as to their ori- gin and development in terms of causation. And here is the place of history. In other words, the sciences having yielded through the schools of objective and subjective sociology such answers as they can to the questions what and how of man and of society, then history must address itself to the whence of man and society, and this it must do without recourse to the hypotheses of theology and metaphysics, since these are, in a strict scientific sense, unverifiable.

The present having been scientifically analyzed and described, and the genesis of its social elements being historically traced backward into the past, there still remains the most important part of the conception of becoming the future. The what, the