Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/118

 104 CRITICAL NOTICES : confound it with the moral and political sciences ". Sociology, the author maintains, is " a science of facts which may very usefully serve to control the science of ideas, but on condition of being independent of it " (p. 1). Its basis must not be psy- chological and subjective, but objective and " experimentale " [ = experiential] . M. Coste wishes to bring back the science to the "positive" character which its founder Auguste Comte sought to give it. He is, however, by no means a blind and uncritical disciple. He modifies considerably the " encyclopasdic series of the sciences " that famous classification, which he considers Comte's greatest philosophical conception (p. 52) ; he alters still more the form and meaning of the " law of the three stages " ; he excludes from sociology a great deal that Comte included in it, and he seeks to keep it clear of misleading physical and biological analogies. Yet he holds that such changes are in accordance with the true spirit of Comte's thinking. " Towards the end of his life the positivist philosopher was led to complete his original series of sciences, which ended with sociology, by adding a seventh science : La morale ou V anthropologie," the division between ethics and sociology being not less real nor less important than that between biology and sociology (p. 52). Littre pointed out that psychology and aesthetics had as good a claim as ethics to be recognised at the end of the scale ; and M. Coste proposes to group them all together under the general name of " Ideology "- a science that exists as yet only in a fragmentary condition (p. 55). The table of fundamental sciences thus admits of rearrangement in a symmetrical scheme of three trilogies : (1) The Mathematical Sciences, viz. : Arithmetic (or, more widely, the Science of Pure Quantity), Geometry, Mechanics ; (2) The Physical Sciences, viz. : Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry ; (3) The Organic Sciences, vis.: Biology, Sociology, Ideology (p. 56). These last three deal re- spectively with "the living organism," "the social organism," " the mental organism " (p. 43). The method of the science of pure quantity is deduction, observation coming in only to a small extent in geometry and even in mechanics. Astronomy, on the other hand, is the most perfect example of a science of observation. In Physics we have experiment, and in Chemistry we have the reversible experiment. Biology introduces the comparative method. Sociology is chiefly dependent on the historical method; and Ideology (in spite of Comte) is in great part dependent on the subjective method, or rather on an objective-subjective method. This chapter (vi.) on method is interesting, and has been con- siderably influenced by Mill's Lo/jic. But the discussion is rather brief and abstract. The author remarks in his preface that scientific discoveries are not made by means of methodology (p. ii.), which is quite true. But as the book before us treats of "principles" (the detailed examination of sociological problems being reserved for a future volume), a fuller discussion of method might have been expected, especially as the distinction drawn