Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/446

430 is a certain stage in the development of science when its influence maybe even disastrous. In the passage from art to science there is a certain stage when the presumptuous application of an imperfect science interferes with the truer and better results of a perfect empiricism, and art is thereby hurt. This is true especially of the more complex arts and sciences. Thus the principles of science must be held in subordination to an enlightened empiricism in such arts as medicine, agriculture, etc. Science can not yet undertake to guide these arts with confidence. So is it also, and in a much greater degree, in the case of human society; for here we have the most difficult art, and the most complex and imperfect science. It must be yet a very long time before the science of sociology can presume to guide the course of social progress. Premature interference with the results of an enlightened empiricism can do nothing but harm.

I have now covered the ground which is implied in the title of this article. I have shown the close connection, both in doctrine and method, between social and organic sciences—a connection similar to that which exists between organic science and that immediately below it in the hierarchy. I have shown that sociology is one of that hierarchy, and the highest. I have shown that the cultivation of this science requires acquaintance with all other and simpler sciences, but especially biology. My task would seem to be done. But I would do violence to my feelings and convictions, and would be liable to serious misconstruction, if I stopped here. What I have thus far said gives but an imperfect idea of the comprehensiveness and complexity of social science. I have yet shown but one side of this complex subject, although the side which is most familiar to my thoughts, and, I believe, also the best developed. It is necessary at least to glance at the other side. I have developed one of the foundations or basic connections of sociology; but there is another, as I now proceed to show.

All along, in the course of this discussion, I have from time to time shown that there are certain limitations to the application of the doctrines and methods of biology to sociology, and that in every case such limitation is the result of the introduction of some new principle characteristic of humanity as distinguished from animality, of reason as distinguished from instinct, of spirit as distinguished from matter. This is precisely what, even from a purely scientific point of view, we ought to expect, and is in fact necessary. For in the scientific hierarchy each science, in addition to the forces and phenomena of the lower sciences, deals with a new force and a new group of phenomena, and therefore with new doctrines and new methods. In going up the scale of sciences we rise successively to a higher and higher plane of activity. On the plane of dead matter only physical and chemical forces operate, and only physical and chemical phenomena occur. On the plane of living matter, in addition to the preceding, we have also vital forces and