Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/370

 358 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

to investigate a particular class or portion of societary phenomena, and formulate certain conclusions, empirically derived, which shall be of use to sociology proper in coming to some explanatory principle for society as a whole. What is meant here may be brought out by a more or less concrete case. Sociology must unify the results of these special social sciences, but it may happen that extreme specialization will distort the perspective of the investigator; or it might be that certain phenomena might be assigned by some special social science to grounds which soci- ology would see to be inaccurate ; e. g., ascribing certain phenom- ena to racial grounds, which phenomena, however, are by another one of the special social sciences found to occur in mobs which are heterogeneous as far as race is concerned. Therefore it is the further business of sociology to resolve such inconsistencies and to correlate the results of the special sciences with reference to a fundamental unity. Just as biology includes morphology, zool- ogy, embryology, and others, so must sociology embrace the special social sciences, as, e. g., the general group of the political sciences including political economy, the philosophy of law, the theory of the state; or the group including archaeology, com- parative philology, and the comparative study of religions; or such sciences as criminology, etc. That sociology has a very extensive and complex field to study is further shown by examin- ing recent works on sociology and noting what the various authors have made out to be the central principle in sociology. Each of these writers has made out a strong case for his own theory so strong, in fact, that one conclusion that can surely be drawn is, that these principles, even if inadequate, are of such importance that an adequate sociological theory must include them as moments. Some of these theories have put down soci- ology as :

1. Philosophy of History (P. Earth, Die Philosophic der Geschichte als Sociologie}.

2. An Application of Biology (Schaffle, Bau und Leben des social fit Korpers; Lilienfeld, Gedanken iiber die Socialwissenschaft der Zukunft; Rene Worms, Organisme et socicte).

3. Consisting in the Description of Social Facts (by statistics: Quetelet,