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Rh and it would tell them of itself when they must go out to seek the sociological part of those various special disciplines which have been mentioned in connection with it. Therefore, the question which Professor Durkheim raised was merely a verbal question. It presented itself to him [the speaker] like that. It was the old logical trouble between the general and the particular. People thought that the general excluded the particular, or that the details excluded the general. But the concrete and special way in which these sciences should be studied, both on their own ground and also in the light of social experience, would give rise to a system of their own, in which part of them would deal with purely logical relations of object-matters, and part with such relations as they showed themselves among groups of people animated by the same mind (taking this as a rough description of social groups).

So that what he said was that they must certainly have a single sociological science with an analysis of the distinctive experience which they called social experience. But that did not mean that they did not have passing out of it a group of sciences which, so far as their sociological part was concerned, took light from and gave light to the analysis of the social experience. Only they were not to think that, if they described the system as a unity of the social sciences, that made sociology into an empty generality. The idea that a unity of a number of things must always be a generality was what they had to make war upon. It would be more like the conception of some kind of living creature or phase of life, some concrete living thing of some kind or another, aspects of which would be illuminated, and by the several sciences which treat the different sides of life.

They should never get into their minds that false formal antithesis that sociology was either a number of sciences which had no central science as their connection, or a single science which was not part of a number of sciences. It was quite certain that true unity and universality would always be, not a generality, but something concrete and individual. Therefore, he said, alternatives in the question, "Is there a science of sociology or a group of sociological sciences?" were not exclusive of one another. He thought the method to be pursued was the definite work of collecting data and their analysis in the various realms of experience of which the facts of social life and grouping form a distinct realm or province. But in science, unlike actual space, all provinces overlap. But the distinctive social science, though not abstract nor general, will include portions of sciences dealing with various positive kinds of experience, so far as these have a social aspect, an aspect manifested in and through groups of persons. Concrete work in the matter of the sciences will tell what their portions are and how connected. Classification will merely register the results. This could be easily illustrated from the science of religion, ethics, aesthetics, psychology, statistics, and other sciences.

I am afraid I am bringing a very discordant note into this discussion. When as a student I took up the study of history, I asked certain questions. My first question, of the utmost importance, was this: "How can we account for the existence of Roman law?" Its perfect systematic form, its charming clearness, its definite shape, were so wonderful to me that it seemed amazing that the Romans made such a wonderful thing. I was told they were a military nation—a nation of warriors. How did it come they could make such an absolute science? Two things had remained absolute—Greek art and Roman law. When you come to think that that law was not public law or constitutional law, but that it was private law; not criminal or international, but the question of commerce and trade, of meum and tuum; then it becomes more wonderful. These Romans despised commerce and trade. They despised their slaves. How did they come to make that law? The problem is of first-class historical import. I wanted to know owing to what circumstances the Romans, of all nations, made the system of Roman law.

Again, why did the Reformation break out in the sixteenth century and not at some other time, and why in Germany and not in France? Fully believing in