Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/466

 45 2 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

There are two ways in which any science may be studied, the speculative and the practical, but the sciences differ among themselves with respect to the extent to which the one or the other of these methods should be carried. As already shown, astronomy and biology, from,their inherent nature, do not readily lend themselves to the practical method, but are mainly pursued for the purpose of acquiring a knowledge of these great fields of nature. This is so specially true of botany and zoology that on a former occasion I used these sciences as representing that method and called it the "natural history method." 1 In the natural history method the only purpose is to learn the natural history of the organism in question. This method is the one chiefly employed in nearly all the departments of anthropology, which is treated as a branch of zoology for the study of the human organism. Many who claim to be sociologists are accus- tomed to look upon human society from this point of view, and their sociology is scarcely anything but anthropology.

The science formerly called political economy, but now gen- erally known as economics, has had a somewhat different his- tory. Its cultivators from the first conceived it as a domain of law, but they carried this principle too far and only recognized animal impulses as actuating man in his industrial relations. These are so comparatively simple that the ruder types of men have had no difficulty in perceiving these laws sufficiently well to utilize them in the domestication of animals. This was done empirically, and what science there is on the subject has been of late development. If human activities had been equally simple the political economy based on it would have been almost as exact as solar astronomy. What actually took place, expressed in the language of dynamic sociology, was that while the early political economists recognized the dynamic agent they neglected the directive agent and its influence in causing perturbations in human activity. Or, expressed in the language of social mechanics, as set forth in the last paper of this series, they recognized social genesis and founded a science of social

1 Publications of the Am. Econ. Assoc., Vol. VI, p. 102.