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 178 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

especial reference to the political and cultural struggle for exist- ence among peoples. A further notable department of specializa- tion is investigation of economic phenomena, introduced in its modern form by Adam Smith. Gradually specialization took possession of all the important phenomena of social life, such as religion, customs, law, civilization, etc. ; and still further the real causes of these phenomena, such as place of abode, climate, race, the statistical elements of social phenomena, etc. ; so that today we have a mass of material from such investigation which it is well-nigh impossible to survey.

Nevertheless, through these special investigations a science of the reciprocal relationships of human beings in general was merely made possible. At first they veiled the nature and the method of sociology. The very research which produced the building materials of sociology assumed a hostile relationship toward that science. In order to understand this we must observe that in the modes of thinking that have come into control since the eighteenth century, so far as social phenomena are concerned, there has been modification by a thought-movement more powerful than speciali- zation itself. It has revolutionized everything that was ancient in science; it has subjected everything else to its method. I refer, of course, to the awakening and the exact development of the natural sciences. These have found all virtue in specialisation, in the singular, in investigation of the microcosm, based upon mathematical certainties. Although it cannot be denied that the tremendous successes of the natural sciences are attributable to this method, yet it is not to be reconciled with our present realistic spirit that such one-sidedness, although it may be easily under- stood, should persist in ascribing all virtue to this method, and should forget that the whole of human progress has not been produced by it, but rather through the integration of ideas, through the intellectual control of the microcosm, through the formation of general ideas. How could Darwin have gone through his biological career if there had not been in his mind from the beginning the vital conception, the intuitive conviction, of the unity of origin of all organisms? Preceding all special labor in astronomy and geology stands, in the form given to Jt by