Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/393

 METAPHYSICAL ELEMENTS IN SOCIOLOGY 381

phenomena, some particular portion of experience, and try to find the laws of its behavior. Metaphysics, on the contrary, may not select in this way. It has the problem of taking all the phenomena in experience, and not merely getting the law of their behavior, but getting that law into terms of some unitary principle which shall be adequate, not alone for each of the selected groups of phenomena individually, but also for any possible combination of groups as well as all the possible groups taken together. So the metaphysical investigation all along the line, and the admis- sion of the extreme breadth of sociology, in no wise weaken the necessity of the demand for a metaphysical investigation at the end of the sociological ; and not only at the end of this latter, but at the end of all the other possible aspects; nor does it weaken the necessity for a distinction between the two.

But the objector, who might be a thinker holding to the narrower view of the field of sociology, might say that this broad field of investigation which we are speaking about is not sociology at all. We in turn ask : What is it then, if it is not sociology ? It certainly is not metaphysics, nor is it cither chemistry, physics, or biology, psychology, or any other science which has any recog- nized status. Its field, and the data from which it starts, are cer- tainly the data of what he calls sociology; only that here we do not restrict ourselves to arbitrary limits, but take the natural limits.

PHILIP H. FOGEL.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY.

[To be concluded.]