Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/501

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 481

genetic, aesthetic, psychic, moral, and juridic aspect, to say nothing of a political aspect ; and in the same way every psychic phe- nomenon, to give another example, is inseparable from the series of the other points of view.

This leads us to recall that the sciences in general are concrete or abstract ; concrete when they look upon the phenomena, the relations, the properties, the laws in the bodies themselves whose study constitutes their domain ; abstract when they consider, on the contrary, these phenomena, relations, properties, and laws independently of the bodies and aside from the variable con- ditions of the same in time and space.

Thus mathematics, mechanics, and rational astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and abstract psychology, are to be dis- tinguished from such kindred sciences as calculus, mineralogy, crystallography, botany, zoology, human psycho-physiology, pedagogy, medicine, including psychiatry, etc. Likewise, the social sciences are concrete in so far as they relate to particular civilizations, societies, and institutions considered in their entirety ; from this point of view they are essentially descriptive and based upon observation and experience.

The abstract sciences in general have the concrete sciences as their foundation, and this is true with regard to the social sciences. The abstract social sciences advance to general, uni- versal laws from the special historical laws developed by the concrete social sciences. This is true not merely of those parts of the social sciences which have as their special object the quanti- tative study of the constitutive elements of societies. Although statical analysis may be applied to these elements aside from the forms in which they concretely appear, it nevertheless remains concrete and historical as long as it does not rise to general relations common to the ensemble of civilizations. In its turn, concrete and descriptive sociology is transformed into a general and abstract philosophy, whose laws, more and more reduced, are the co-ordinated expression of the relations common to all societies from the simplest to the most complex, without regard to their variable conditions in the past, present, or future. Abstract sociology attempts also to reduce these temporary or historical variations to a regular order, to laws.