Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/898

 864 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

aged and infirm. This includes the entire capital cost of the buildings, and of the reclamation of the land, beyond the comparatively small sum originally paid for the property, and also the whole cost of the staff and its pensions. As about half of this sum represents the wages or bonus paid to the colonist, the actual net cost to the state is reduced to about 5 per head a year, as against 16 in an average English country workhouse, or 22 in an English local prison, or 28 in a convict prison. Both the latter figures, be it noted, do not include the capital cost. H. J. TORR, in Economic Review, January, 1904.

E. B. W.

Sociology and the Social Sciences. The Revue Internationale de sociologie announced last autumn a series of lectures which would be given at the School of Social Studies at Paris, upon the relation of sociology to the various social sciences. These lectures, followed by discussions, commenced last December. We give here a resume of the first three, and our intention is to do the same for those which follow them.

" General Introduction," lecture by E. Durkheim. Shall sociology continue to be a philosophical synthesis of social life in accordance with the fundamental bonds which unite and the laws which embrace social phenomena? Or shall sociology, on the contrary, break itself up into separate sciences, for purposes of specialization ? To Comte sociology was essentially the study, not of definite parts, but of the social whole which possesses a character of its own. His dis- ciples have only reproduced the thought of the master without making progress for the science. But why should sociology consist of a single problem? Social facts are complex realities and do not readily yield the general laws of sociality ; there is need for the study of each category separately. If sociology wishes to live, it ought to renounce the philosophical character which it owes to its origin, and approach concrete realities by means of special researches, thereby acquiring precision and objectivity.

Lecture by G. Tarde. Sociology ought to be the science and not the phi- losophy of social facts. The several social sciences, with their comparisons of different classes of facts, are in need of being themselves compared. This com- parison of comparisons would be sociology. The division of labor among the social sciences which M. Durkheim emphasizes must be supplemented by the syn- thesis of these different sciences. For this purpose the aid of intermental psychology is indispensable. It ought to be to the social sciences what the study of the cell is to the biological sciences. Running throughout social phenomena there is this common element, this inter-psychological character. There are two categories of social facts to be studied : ( i ) the groups of persons which act inter- mentally (families, classes, nations) ; (2) the groups of actions (languages, cus- toms, institutions). Thanks to intermental psychology, sociology will be able to be a central science, and not merely a common name given to a bundle of social sciences.

" Relation of Sociology to Ethnography," lecture by Maxime Kovalewsky. Ethnography furnishes material for the reconstruction of the initial stages of society, which is much more certain than that supplied by the study of legends or ancient customs. It has to do with a period earlier than those with which archaeology, history, or folk lore may deal. In ethnographical research it is only by the wide and careful use of the comparative method that generalizations regarding customs and other social phenomena may be made. By such a study not the isolated facts, but the interrelated circumstances which point to real causes, may be discovered. Modern sociologists have shown a pronounced inclina- tion for reducing the causes of the evolution of peoples to a ingle factor, whether the geographical situation of the country, the climate, or the mode of economic production. But these various factors aid each other mutually, and it is a mis- take to wish to reduce them to one. Less of anarchy may be expected to rule in ethnographic science when investigators approach their work with a wider knowl- edge and a more scientific habit of thought, for the ethnographer ought to be at once historian, psychologist, folklorist, and a student of the exact sciences and of sociology. MARCEL POURNIN, " La sociologie et les sciences sociales," in Revue international de sociologie, February, 1904. E. B. W.