Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/160

 146 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Hume's Treatise of Human Nature was the highest expression of philosophy endeavoring to unify the total available knowledge of man. But between the publication of Hume's Treatise in 1739 and Comte's attempt at a fresh synthesis almost exactly a century intervened. It is, indeed, a coincidence worthy of remark that the particular volume of the Philosophie positive which introduced the word "sociology" was actually published in 1839. In this intervening century the range of verifiable knowledge was enormously extended in all departments of investigation. It was a period of immense activity, analytic and synthetic, in the mathematical and physical sciences witness the names of Fourier, Lagrange, and Laplace, of Carnot, Coulomb, and Volta, of Scheele, Lavoisier, Cavendish, Davy, Berthollet, and Dalton. But, as affecting the genesis of sociology, the main features of the century were, in the first place, the creation of the biological sciences as definite systems of study, and, in the second place, the growth of the conception of a science of history. In whole or in part belong to the period 1739-1842 the labors of Linnaeus, Haller, and Jussieu, of Buffon and Cuvier; and, finally, the attempt of Bichat, of Lamarck, and of Treviranus to institute a general science of the phenomena of life, for which both the latter used the title "biology." The idea of a science of human history, if it belongs to any one individual, belongs to Vico, who held that he had established it by his "new science" in 1725. This idea, in the interval between Hume's Treatise and Comte's Positive Philosophy, had been notably developed by Montesquieu, Turgot.Condorcet, and St. Simon, by Lessing, Herder, and Kant, by Adam Smith, Ferguson, and Millar.

The particular task which Comte proposed to himself was to survey with the eye of philosophy the scientific and historical labors of this prolific century intervening between Hume and himself. His attempted unification was propounded under the name of the "positive philosophy," and for that portion of the "positive philosophy" which set forth the bearing of the new scientific and historical knowledge on the conceptions of human nature and society he proposed the name "sociology." These he understood to be the two perennial problems of philosophy