Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/688

 674 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

augurated at Berlin on January 3. It was also in January of this year that the sociological Society of Birmingham was founded. Such is a bare enumeration, perhaps incomplete, of this move- ment for the scientific study of society.

The teaching of sociology in the great universities and its discussion before these learned bodies are paralleled by the activity of the press, both through the establishment of special organs devoted to it and through the writing of books on the subject by able authors in all countries. Any attempt to enume- rate these would carry me far beyond the limits of this paper.

What are we to conclude from all this ? Is the whole world, then, insane and chasing an ignis fatuus, a pseudo-science? I would be the last to fall back upon the old doctrines of vox populi and quod uhique, quod ah omnibus, as proofs of anything. Many grave errors have been long popular and well-nigh universal. But have any of the sciences had to be abandoned as false ? Yes, they say, and point to alchemy. But alchemy was rather an art. There is a sort of social alchemy, and sociology is the social chemistry whose mission it is to supplant it. Society is a domain of natural phenomena, and there must be a science to deal with it. There was no such science till sociology came. It is not the same as the science of man (anthropology) ; it is not the same as the science of wealth (economics) ; it is not the same as the science of government and the state (political science). In a certain sense these all belong to sociology, or fall under it, as furnishing its data. They are special social sciences, and there are many more, but they do not, separately or together, constitute sociology. Sociology has been called the synthesis of all the special social sciences. It is that, but it is more. It gathers material from fields not included in any recognized science, but its great work is the co-ordination of all social facts, and the elaboration of a reasoned and systematized body of knowledge relating to social origins, social processes, social development, and social causation.

Notwithstanding the recruits that sociology is constantly receiving from all sides and the general silencing of adverse criticism by the logic of events, there ever and anon arises a new voice from some quarter reiterating the old cry that sociology is