Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/766

 750 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

term in its broadest sense using as their instruments ideas and emotions. Temporal powers seek to determine conduct by using material rewards as impulse, and physical fear as deterrents.

The popular distinction between state and church may be regarded as a particular case of the wider popular distinction between the law and the gospel; and this again is a particular case of the larger scientific generalization of temporal and spir- itual powers. There are, of course, practical advantages which prompt the popular mind to extend its widening circles of general concepts, which again are further refined and developed by science. The general concept is to a mere collection of facts what regimentation is to a mob of men. It enables one to neglect individual eccentricities, and predict the collective behavior of the group, whether the group consists of items called facts or items called men. The inducement to widen the generalization is, that the larger its scope, the broader are the limits of prediction. The assumption made is that the process of generalization is a gradual one, and that the steps from the concrete facts up to the largest generalization are all traceable without a break. In other words, a generalization must be of a kind which in science is called verifiable, that is to say, the prediction based upon it must refer to a course of future events, which must either happen or not happen at a given place and within a given and finite time. And this proviso of verifiability gives a definiteness and fixity to scien- tific generalizations which is often absent from those alike of the popular mind or of the poetic imagination.

XXII. There are those who tell us that there is no proper science of society, because there are no known sociological laws. Others go still farther and say that the nature of human society is such that no social laws are discoverable; that there is no science of human society; that sociology not only does not, but never will, exist. This is a mode of argument well known to historians of scientific thought. It has been used at every epochal advance, by the obscurantists, to justify their ignorance and soothe their vanity. It belongs, in fact, to the self-protective devices so common everywhere throughout the organic world, and especially among the higher animals. Probably the most