Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/192

 1 80 THE AMERICA N JO URNAL OF SOCIOL OG Y

logical, biological, anthropological, geographical, or other similar standpoints, they attempt to detect the fundamental principles of social relationships. These attempts are of course futile, because sociology cannot be derived inductively from a single one of these numerous fields of knowledge. It must be derived from them all. If one of these scientific factors is omitted, or is not taken into the reckoning at its full value, the sociological calculation is on that account as vicious as if in a mathematical formula one should omit even the most unimportant symbol. The laws of social relationship are like those of the universal mechanism, to be dis- covered only from a survey of all the phenomena. All absorption in a special group of phenomena brings with it the danger of running into antithesis with the laws which govern the whole; this, in other words, means danger of giving a false interpreta- tion to the special. The Ptolemaic conception of the universe remains the perpetual warning of the dangers of a too narrow point of view.

It was Comte who first recognized this truth. His positivism compares the facts of reflection, of sense-perception, and of social evolution, so that the synthesis may be an induction from an adequate series of experiences. We know that Comte's work did not succeed, because, on the one hand, he did not have the com- prehensive knowledge of the objective phenomena of social life, and because, on the other hand, he had not sufficiently investigated man, the unit of these reciprocal relationships. Kant's influence was, however, by no means without effect. His positive method won the conviction of investigators more and more as the method by which it is necessary to reach a scientific comprehension of the content of human relationships. This perception came into natural correlation with the products of special investigation. On the basis of the scientifically ascertained facts, of the natural laws and of logic, search is now made for the social laws. Interpreted by the conceptions of positive monism they merge with the laws of nature and of reasoning into a unified doctrinal structure. Sociological knowledge is thus not, as hostile scholars allege, a dialectically woven web, but a product of the same intellectual process which every special science applies when it condacts