Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/118

 104 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

by discussion and concepts found to be invalid are discarded. If the invalid concept was of vital importance, then the terminology derived from it is also discarded and a new terminology is evolved. The process is illustrated by the way in which chemistry super- seded alchemy. A similar fate seems to impend over sociology, but until the reconstruction of political science on Darwinian prin- ciples, now taking place, advances beyond the present stage of col- lection and verification of data, and has some generalizations to propound, sociology has its day. The matter might be left to right itself if sociology preserved the proper scientific habit of reserve as to provisional and tentative conclusions. But since it has gone into the forum to harangue the mob, it is the duty of whom it may concern to follow it there and to give notice that it possesses no authority whatever. If anything is urged in the name of sociology the fit rejoinder is that there is no such science.