Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/499

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 479

recall to mind, if need be, that, faithful to the positive method, the present work rests essentially upon the widest observation that it has been possible for me to make, in addition to the numerous materials furnished by the learned specialists whose works I have followed attentively. In the third volume of Abstract Sociology, documentation will therefore appear only in an explica- tive way, and not at all as demonstration ; that is, as in the Transformisme social, a detached portion of the last part of my work devoted to the life of societies.

In the Structure gtmtrale, no more than in the fattments and Functions et organs sociaux, or in Transformisme social and Lois sociologiques, do we claim, like Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, to have constructed an abstract sociology in its entirety. At present such an attempt would surpass the indi- vidual capacity of the sociologist and the corresponding and preliminary maturity of the special social sciences. As hereto- fore, we shall have mainly in view the indication of the methods and plan which may doubtless lead to the construction of this sociology in the future. Yet we shall trace, as far as we can, some outlines calculated to indicate some principle features which maturer sociology will contain.

After the great synthetic, but premature, effort of Quetelet, of Comte, and of Spencer, it seems to me that the work ought to be renewed with the more complete co-ordination of the special social sciences, particularly of political economy, ethics, and law, which are in course of transformation. 1

In Materialisme historique, I have already pointed out the danger to which we are exposed by a certain part of contem- poraneous sociological literature with its particular points of view. I refer especially to the exclusively psychological school. It is producing a very brilliant, even useful, literature, but one- sided, and therefore quite divested of that consideration of the ensemble which is and must remain precisely the sociological

1 1 expected to devote an early chapter of the work to a theoretical and critical expose* of the statics of Quetelet, of Comte, and of Spencer, an expose* which has been the subject of a three-years' course at L' Universite* nouvelle, but this chapter has itself become a considerable volume, which I hope to publish soon as a comple- ment of the present work.