Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/502

 482 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

The possibility of establishing an abstract sociology has been strongly contested by the different schools, which recognize only historical laws, that is to say, laws applicable solely to determined periods and civilizations. Naturally, it had to be thus, since, in sociology as elsewhere, concrete knowledge precedes abstract knowledge, and since the different attempts to establish an abstract sociology, from the fact that they were premature, seemed by their very feebleness and imperfection to confirm the condemnation pronounced by the representatives of the purely historical school. Yet, this condemnation will not be perpetual; the very progress of the concrete social sciences will result in lessening its severity and duration. It was also necessary that this conflict blaze out with greatest force precisely in the domain of economic science, the first of the social sciences in order of formation ; but, for the same cause, it is also in this science that it will soonest come to an end. The passage to an abstract social economy will be facilitated by the works of Wagner, Roscher, Rumelin, Schmoller, and, among the socialists, of Karl Marx, as well as by the more and more profound studies relative to popu- lation, family, art, to scientific and philosophic doctrines, and to moral, juridic, and political institutions. Even the facts of social life make for this result ; in proportion as the vast, world-wide society is organized with its superior centers of co-ordination above the particular societies, it will be recognized that common, constant, and universal laws have always governed in the forma- tion and evolution of historic societies, apart from and beyond their accessory variations. This unity of sociological philosophy will appear plain with the world-wide unity of reality. Then, thanks to the progressive narrowing of the amplitude of social oscillations in a more and more co-ordinated world-wide civili- zation, it will be recognized so much the easier that, notwith- standing the more ample and apparently more disordered oscillations and variations of particular antecedent civilizations, in reality the same order is always imposed, although with pur- turbations, which, however, have never succeeded in altering its general character, structural as well as evolutive, static as well as dynamic.