Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/637

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 621

manifestations of one underlying reality, but no one has suc- ceeded in making that unity visible.

It is accordingly not surprising that the followers of Comte took two divergent courses. Some of them pursued the spiritual clue ; others worked in accordance with the mechanical or physi- ological conception. It would have been very natural if those followers of Comte who were most impressed by the spiritual conception in his doctrine had emphasized the idea which super- ficial readers have always fixed upon as the most important part of his teaching, namely, his division of human experience into the three stages. With more correct insight, or instinct, how- ever, the tendency which we have now to notice followed rather the methodological clue in the doctrine than its material content. We have noticed how important in Comte's mind was the principle of classification. Beginning with the simpler sciences and continuing through the subject-matter of all science, including sociology, Comte insisted upon classification dictated by the peculiarities of the things classified. Thus classification with Comte is itself science. To know enough about objects or facts to arrange them in scientific classes, we must obviously have enough knowledge of their essential peculiarities to mark a good degree of scientific progress. Conversely, an attempt in the Comtean spirit to classify the subject-matter chosen as a scientific field amounts to a pledge that the things to be classi- fied will be duly investigated, so that their likenesses and differ- ences may be known. For this reason those writers whom Barth calls the "classifying sociologists" deserve sincere respect, whether the categories which they have proposed prove perma- nent or not. Their attempt has been to discover those essential attributes of social facts which constitute marks of likeness or unlikeness. So far as it goes, this search for the signs of simi- larity and dissimilarity is true science, provided it observes sci- entific principles in deciding what are the qualities attributed to the subject-matter in question. It is not an invention of the sociologists. It is merely a sign on the part of the sociologists that they have so far heeded the lessons taught by the maturer sciences.