Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/515

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 495

this intimate blending of inorganic and organic factors into structures which are necessarily larger and more complex than organisms properly speaking, permits us to confer upon even the smallest and simplest societies the name super organisms. Yet this appellation need not imply, a priori, any absolute iden- tity, either quantitative or qualitative, with organisms. The question of resemblances and differences is answered by direct observation of social facts, and by their comparison with organ- isms. It would be a capital error to proceed by simple assimila- tion and to seek thereby to deduce the laws of sociology from those of biology and psychology ; sociology has its own char- acteristics and its own laws. It is only by making an abstrac- tion of these special characteristics that sociology can perhaps be correlated gradually with the simpler and more general laws of the antecedent sciences. This operation is not within the proper domain of sociology, but belongs to that of the general philosophy of the sciences ; the single philosophic ambition of sociology should be to reduce its own laws to a single sociologi- cal law, if it is possible to do so. Nevertheless, this most gen- eral sociological law, by its very nature, will be in direct contact with those of the antecedent sciences, and therefore with the most general law of philosophy as a whole.

We have recognized that the combination of the two elemen- tary factors constitutive of every society (land and population) reveals itself, upon analysis, in phenomena, or, if one prefers, in properties or in forces, sui generis. We have classified these phe- nomena on the basis of their common and distinctive character- istics, and we have drawn up this classification in a serial and hierarchic order, according to the increasing complexity and speciality of the phenomena, just as Comte classified the phe- nomena relative to the antecedent sciences.

In conformity with this methodical classification of social phenomena, which is at once logical and dogmatic, natural and historical, we have constructed a hierarchic series of the special social sciences, concrete as well as abstract, of which sociology represents the general philosophy :