Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/312

298 THE AM ERIC AX JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY wants, as if all motives were of coordinate importance to sociology. The result is not the reasoned knowledge that is science.

This method is remarkable for two reasons. It reverses the method that has been used effectively in the physical interpretation of society. It reverses the method that has been applied successfully to subjective interpretation in politics and especially in economics. Political economy does not construct its doctrine of conduct by inventory, but by abstraction. … If sociology expects to obtain scientific precision it must follow this significant example of the value of consistent method.

The above misconception of facts is in some respects the most unaccountable vagary in the book. Did Darwin pursue a faulty method in collecting material for years, instead of propounding a "subjective explanation" and taking his chances of finding facts in accordance with it? Who says, while he collects and arranges evidence for an inductive process, that all items of evidence are of "coördinate importance?" A part of the process is the classifying of the data, bringing them into hierarchies of categories, discovering principal and subordinate relationships down to the minutest order. Giddings' method brushes all this aside as "tiresome," and substitutes for it a "principle." In contrast with a generalization from critically observed data, that which he calls a "principle" takes logical rank along with Thales' principle water; and Pythagoras' number; and Anaximenes' air; and Anaxagoras'. It would be placed higher than it deserves if the principle "consciousness of kind" were compared with the principle phlogiston of the old chemistry. Undoubtedly Stahl and others used that presumptive explanation of fire as a guide to observation that at last revealed the process of combustion. The iniquity of these arbitrary assumptions emerges in their practical inhibition of observation as possible impeachment of their authority. This is obviously the case with Giddings and his principle "consciousness of kind." It makes him contemptuous toward analytic examination and classification of actions containing positive evidence of the play of motive.

It should be noted further that Giddings' assumed "principle" at once authorizes him to reconstruct the history of other sciences. The two "remarkable" reasons alleged against the positive method are remarkable because they exist only in Giddings' imagination. The history neither of physical nor of psychical science contains justification of his dictum. The assertion that "political economy does not construct its doctrine of conduct by inventory, but by abstraction," may