Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/832

 8i8 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

scientific formulas which are found fruitful in those sciences are adequate instruments of interpretation of the social as such ; for on such a view the social life loses its intimate and first-hand character as personal experience. Biological analogies have been urged, physical "energetics" has been invoked, even geographical changes have been cited, as determining causes of social events. But to whichever of these sciences we may resort, we find this limitation, namely, that the given social situation — both as re- spects content and as respects form of organization — is stripped of whatever characters the rule of interpretation adopted, whether biological, or physical, does not justify and explain.

For example, the moral life is a series of social situations implicating personalities as such, wills acting and reacting upon one another. To explain such situations by the laws of physical or physiological change is to reduce personality to an atomistic and mechanical complex and to close the door in advance to the investigation of the psychological and purely social aspects of moral experience.^ Whatever philosophical interpretation we may finally adopt of the social mode of reality — taken in its natural context with the physical and biological — we must still not allow this interpretation, whether it be physical or spiritual, to hinder, embarrass, or prejudice social science. On the con- trary, the positive science of society must be built upon the facts of social observation and experience ; and such a science must be given the same right to establish the criteria of its proper facts that we allow the other sciences. Biologists will not vacate right in favor of physics, nor should sociology in favor of either. Psy- chology has in fact been through the same period, having to assert its right to existence as against the presumptions of physi- ology.

With these cautions in mind, I wish to inquire what current biological and psychological science teach us respecting the condi- tions of nature and development of social solidarity.

"Energetics," in Vol. XII of the Annales de I'Inst. Inter, de Sociologie, for a more positive criticism of one of these cases of scientific presumption coming from physics. Criticism of the "biological analogy" is to be found in my Social and Ethical Interpretations, chap, xiv, on "Social Progress," especially § 4.
 * The reader may compare the remarks on Professor Ostwald's paper oo