Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/266

 248 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

(structural) sciences." In the former group belongs, with the historical discip- lines in the narrower sense, philology ; in the second group, ethnology, econom- ics, jurisprudence, and sociology, in various of the senses in which the latter term is today used to mean something less comprehensive than social philosophy.

Here it may be noted that at present sociology, when understood in the larger sense contrasted with the above, seems to occupy a place in the second group corresponding with that of universal history in the first group. Sociology depends for material upon the special investigations of the other members of the group. Sociology, in turn, must organize those materials. Hence sociology is today, in fact, scarcely distinguishable from the history of civilization, on the one side, or, on the other side, from special attempts to organize interpre- tation of social relationships, such as general economics.

Since all societary conditions are products of historical development, we must advance the next step by treating of the logic of the historical sciences, as introductory to the logic of the social sciences. The close connection of the territories expresses itself in the fact that each social science includes one or more historical disciplines, e. g., economics, the history of economics, and eco- nomic history.

CHAPTER IV. RELATION OF PSYCHICAL SCIENCES TO PHILOSOPHY.

Since the psychical sciences are coordinate with and supplementary to the natural sciences as organizations of experience ; since psychology is the most general member of the class of psychical sciences, it goes without saying that the relation of psychical sciences to philosophy will be like that in the case of psychology and the natural sciences. No scientific philosophy can do without these divisions of experience. They, however, may address their own proper tasks, without any further philosophical assistance than the assumed veracity of the general system of perceptive agencies through which reality is reported in consciousness.'

The more they do this, the better it will be for their proper offices. This freedom from all sorts of metaphysical anticipation in dealing with the data of experience by no means involves perpetual prohibition of scientific thought upon relations transcending experience, particularly teleological foresight. (a) To demand that science shall begin without philosophy is not to demand that it shall end without philosophy. On the contrary, (b) positive treatment of reality always sooner or later begets a philosophy from within, if it is not suppressed by arbitrary imposition of a philosophy from without. In the last two remarks (a) and (*) is a clue to the radical difference between the obsolescent and the adolescent philosophy. The old philosophy was a Noah's

' This is a variation of CoMTE's Descriptive and Statical Sociology and Ward's Statical and Dynamic Sociology.

' Vide contents of Wundt, Logic of Physics and Chemistry, chaps. 2 and 3.