Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/146

 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS.

On the Relation of Sociology to the Social Sciences and to Philosophy.

I.

The prime postulate of a science of society is the inclusion of human phe- nomena within the unity of nature. Thus only can social phenomena be subjected to those precise observations which may be resumed in general formulae called natural laws. To Comte is due the establishment of this idea of extending natural law to human societies. But the sociology of Comte was in actual con- struction philosophical rather than scientific ; i. c., it was characterized by general views, and a certain indifference for factual detail and the researches of specialists. The same is true of the sociology of Spencer. But by demonstrating the applicability of the evolution hypothesis to human societies as well as to the physical and the biological worlds, Spencer still more closely linked human to natural phenomena. In other respects, Spencer also helped to complete and rectify the general conceptions of the Comtist sociology. Thus, for example, in positing the differentiation of social types, ignored by Comte, Spencer opened the way lor those taxonomic studies necessary for a scientific classification of human societies.

Most subsequent sociologists have continued the Comte-Spencer tradition of seeking to discover the general laws of social evolution by speculative rather than observational methods. But meantime, and especially during the past half- century, there has been taking place in the several social sciences, which have grown up outside the general conceptions of sociology, a revolution which is tantamount to a creation or recreation of these specialisms as departments of sociology.

In effecting this revolutionary change of the social sciences from a more literary and philosophic to a more scientific basis, the chief methodological factor has teen the introduction of the historical and the comparative method, more especially in application to the evolutions of institutions.

Thus, the several social sciences have, more or less independently and automatically, been reorganizing themselves on a sociological basis, but without explicit reference to philosophical synthesis ; while, at the same time, recent sociologists have tended to work in comparative isolation from the specialists. Thus, at the present time is manifested a certain tendency to create a general science of sociology outside, and in some degree opposed to, the several specialisms concerned with the scientific study of different departments and aspects of human society. Thus there is developing in social studies a position which is the very negation of that which Comte posited as the necessary foundation of a science of sociology.

How to arrest these perilous tendencies toward isolation isolation of the social sciences one from another, and of general sociology from the mass of the social sciences?

The sociologist must recognize that in no other way can a unified science of society be developed than by the systematization of all scientific specialisms which are essentially sociological in character. As conspicuous examples of such necessary and legitimate sociological specialisms, the following may be mentioned : the comparative study of institutions, as transformed and developed by juristic historians like Maine, philosophical historians like Fustel de Coulanges, and their successors ; economics, as pursued by investigators of the type of Schmoller and Bucher ; anthropology, as developed by Prichard, Waitz, Gerland, Morgan, McLennan, etc. ; comparative ethics, as studied by A. H. Post,