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 242 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

speak of natural objects. There are only objects which present phenomena that lead us to posit psychical antecedents.

At this point Comte lost his bearings. He made the psychical sciences coordinate with the special natural sciences. His thesis was that the psy- chical sciences differ from physiology only in the fact that the latter studies the living organism as an individual, while the former, viz., history, economics, Jurisprudence, etc., deal with a multitude of similar human organisms.^ This view makes sociology merely the highest member in the scale of natural sciences.' It makes sociology differ from the natural sciences, not in princi- ple, but only in consequence of the greater complexity of the phenomena with which it is concerned.

This contention of Comte is a negative variation of the same philosophy that divided things into bodies corporeal and bodies psychical. Since there is no such thing known to our experience as independent spirits, separate from bodies, Comte denies the possibility of relatively independent psychical sciences. The denial would be pertinent if it were necessary for psychical sciences to have for their subject-matter objects absolutely distinct from natu- ral objects. Since such objects do not exist, while, on the other hand, the separate psychical sciences do exist, the valid conclusion is rather that this whole division of the sciences, in correspondence with a supposed separate- ness of objects, is untenable. It is as though we should say that we cannot have a science of geometry separate from crystallography.

The one motive which, from the beginning, has determined the division of scientific labor has been the discrimination of the different classes of occur- rences given in our experience. In some cases the reference has been to objective traits of those occurrences, in others to subjective valuations of those occurrences. Only after the discrimination of specific occurrences had been followed by a grouping of certain important classes of occurrences, was the attempt to distinguish definite objects made into a subsidiary principle for the determination of scientific territories, e. g., in natural science, and in the shape of subordination in mathematics and the psychical sciences. In the latter stage, particularly, the increasing importance attributed to the derivation of the objects is really another manifestation of the tendency to make occur- rences, rather than physically separate entities, the basis of distinction.

Let us take the point of view that the original distinction of division in the subject-matter of experience must have its ground in differences between classes of occurrences. If we try to account for the cleavages between sci- ences from this point of view, it is entirely intelligible that one and the same entity may be subject-matter for quite different sciences. Each grand division of scientific labor, i. e., each " science," rests on an obvious abstrac- tion from the material given in experience. This abstraction is then exploited to the utmost extent of logical elaboration. In this logical process we dis-

» Positive Philosophy, I, sees. 1-3 and sec. 46.

' Spencer has been charged by De Greef with coming to this result