Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/526

 SIO THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

somewhat as astronomy from astrology, or chemistry from alchemy. This is by no means to deny essential similarity of purpose, to a certain extent at least, between the earlier and the later attempts to discover social laws. "Sociology is accordingly the natural successor, heir, and assign of the worthy but ineffective philosophy of history."'

It is needless to ask how early men directed their attention to the actions of men, and tried to see those actions in their con- nections with each other, and then tried to recount the facts in their supposed relations. There came a time, at all events — let us say, for convenience, with Herodotus and Thucydides — when this attention to actions of men in the large was conscious and deliberate. It had taken the place and rank of a dignified intel- lectual pursuit. It called itself history. It undertook to tell both what men had done and why they had done it. This, in general, is precisely what sociology tries to do today. History is, therefore, sociology in the yolk. We shall understand soci- ology best not by dogmatizing about the sort of thing which it would please us to designate by that name. The name has come to stand for something which is asserting itself, whether we like it or not. We shall form a more intelligent view of soci- ology if we follow the trunk line of its evolution from men's earliest naive attempts to see human actions together. This is what history has been from the beginning. It is what sociology is now. Sociology exists today because a few men have dis- covered that, if we are to see human actions in their most essential relations, a more complicated machinery of research and organization is necessary than historiography controls.

The disrepute into which the philosophy of history has fallen is not due to disbelief that there has been method in human experience. When a modern critical historian speaks with con- tempt of the philosophy of history, he refers either to some of the obsolete methods of reaching historical judgments, or to some other man's philosophy of history. He is surely not con- temptuous himself, nor willing that others should be, toward his own philosophy of history. He always has one, if he is anything

^Journal of Political Economy, March, 1895, p. 173.