Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/113

 THE PRETENSIONS OF SOCIOLOGY 99

The lastest official bulletin is probably that issued by Professor Small. In an article contributed to the American Journal of Soci- ology, July, 1908, he says:

Whether or not there is, or ever shall be, a science of sociology, there is and will hardly cease to be something which, for lack of a better name, we may call the sociological movement. This movement clearly vindicates the sociologists.

This, of course, suggests the query. What, then, is the sociological movement? What vision has it of fresh fields of knowledge that suggests the need of a new science to garner the results of research ? We are told that the movement is fundamentally "a declaration of faith that the closest approach to ultimate organization of knowl- edge which finite intelligence can ever reach must be a formula- tion of the relations of all alleged knowledge to the central process of human experience." But has not that been the object of phi- losophy ever since it originated in ancient Greece? At any rate, it is clear that this movement, this faith, on its own showing, has no right to rank as a science or to set up any claim of authority.

Ill Accepting for the present the plea of confession and avoidance that is offered by the exponents of sociology when its scientific pretensions are challenged, let us consider it as a movement. In this respect, too, on its own showing, it is quite bewildered. It does not know whence it starts, or whither it is going. J. H. W. Stuckenberg, in his Sociology, the Science of Human Society (1903), has to admit that the very nature of the subject which sociology proposes to treat is yet to be settled. He remarks that "society is the new world which is still waiting for its Columbus ;" and, again, that "the nature of society is the profound problem whose solution is the key to all other solutions." Darwin has offered a solution of this problem, namely, that human society was evolved from brute society by stresses resulting from the group incident of natural selection, so that human society was shaped by the life of the community precisely as bee nature has been shaped by the life of the hive, certain distinctive organs and capacities being developed in the individual, not primarily for individual ad- vantage, but for the advantage of the community. Thus Darwin's theory coincides with Aristotle's doctrine that man is born a politi- cal animal. In any period before the formation of society, the human species did not exist, but at the most only simian species