Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/513

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 493

in the case of most of the sociologists of our epoch, who have not hesitated to approach general sociology with an insufficient preparation in the special social sciences. As a consequence, they have fatally neglected the essential and original character- istics of social phenomena, and have deduced the laws of these phenomena from the laws of the antecedent sciences, especially in recent times from the laws of biology and psychology, which are themselves imperfectly understood by the literati of this class. Yet it is necessary, in spite of the defect which they have in common with these other writers, to render full justice to the works of Lilienfield, Tarde, G. Lebon, and others, whose biologic and psychic deductions have very usefully, and even brilliantly, pointed out the relations and analogies that is to say, the real similarities which unite sociology to the two directly anteced- ent sciences ; integral sociology will always have to take account of their points of view.

The empirical method is just the opposite of the scientific method. The latter starts with the consideration of the simplest and most general facts in order to advance methodically to the more complex and more special. Empiricism proceeds from the consideration of the external and superficial ensemble to the consideration of the deeper elements. It is only then that it works its transformation into science and, retracing in an inverse direction the first route traversed, advances methodically to knowledge, properly speaking. At the most, one may say that empiricism, by proceeding from the whole to the elements, opens the way to science, and that in this respect, by placing itself at a very broad point of view, it is a natural process in the advance of the human mind. In fact, the empirical method was employed in the infancy of all the sciences ; but in no science is the whole known before the elements and the parts. As well say that a person upon another planet who distinguishes the earth knows our earth ; he does not know it, in reality, any more than we know the planet Mars, for example.

In the first part of our Introduction a la sociologie, we proceeded to the most complete analysis possible of the constituent ele- ments of social bodies ; we have shown that all these elements