Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/500

 480 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

point of view. But this present inferiority is only relative ; it prepares for future progress ; it is precisely like that equally natural phenomenon the attempt of the founders of sociology (with the possible exception of Quetelet) to create a social synthesis at a time when the social sciences, and even the sciences directly anterior to sociology, such as biology and psychology, were yet insufficiently developed. The result has been the biologic and psychologic interpretations, and then also the later materialistic or economic interpretations all of which indicate precisely the necessity of reconstructing soci- ology upon all the facts of each of these sciences. Likewise, we see one school contending that the social question is a moral question, another that it is a juridical question, while the majority still consider it essentially political.

Transition from the study of social elements, functions, and organs to the study of the general structure of societies necessi- tates both a few definitions and a few retrospective surveys.

We have defined "sociology" as the general philosophy of the special social sciences. These are :

1. Economics, or the science of social nutrition.

2. Genetics, or the science of population.

3. ^Esthetics.

4. Collective psychology: religion, metaphysics, positive philosophy.

5. Ethics.

6. Law.

7. Politics.

Each of these sciences has its special philosophy. It is the abstract ensemble of these philosophies that constitutes the domain of sociology.

This classification represents to us the totality of the social sciences according to their natural, logical, historical, and dog- matic order of increasing specialization and complexity, or of decreasing generality and simplicity, in conformity with the classification of antecedent sciences established by Auguste Comte. This order of classification is abstract, for in concrete reality every economic phenomenon, for example, implies a