Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/78

66 founder of that Novum Organum or gospel of modern intellectual regeneration.

In his classification of sciences, based upon their increasing concreteness and speciality, he states that science, though essentially one in opposition to metaphysics and theology, ought to be divided into branches, or sciences in a more restricted acceptation of the word, each of them corresponding to a well-defined series, the number of which he fixed at six, as follows: first, Mathematics; second, Astronomy; third, Physics; fourth, Chemistry; fifth, Biology; and sixth, Sociology.

Without insisting upon the number of these divisions or their philosophic value, I shall only consider the limits of sociology as they have been traced by the master-hand of the French patriarch of that strange mixture of knowledge and faith ("Catholicism minus Christ and plus erudition," as it has been styled), which still holds sway over so many minds under the name of the Positive Philosophy, and the peculiarities of which are partly due to the depressed state of his health at the time when he wrote his most important sociological works, and partly, perhaps, to his native pedagogic whims.

According to Comte, sociology ought to be a science, so to speak, exclusively human. Social facts may be common in the life of animals, and even of plants, but he entreats the sociologists of his school not to pay them any attention. While other sciences are cultivated for the sake of truth, Comte would have sociology to be learned only for the sake of human morality. As to the methods of sociological research, he admitted them in his first writings to be similar to the strictly scientific methods of observation and induction, but he soon retracted that admission, and declared that skeptical analysis ought not to enter the sacred precincts, synthesis alone being worthy of such elevated study. Thus he voluntarily created an abyss between science and sociology.

Referring to the limits and object of sociology, the statements of the great founder of the French positive philosophy appear, in certain respects, far more worthy of acceptance. Selecting, arbitrarily, the human individual as the starting-point of his researches, he observes that one part only of our activity is based upon egoistic instincts arising from need of nutrition or personal preservation in general; that part, including our uppermost psychological recesses, belongs to the biological domain. Sociology includes the remainder—viz., that part of human activity which is based not upon individual self-satisfaction, but upon what he calls altruistic instincts, supposing them to be inherent in every living being. The physiological roots of altruism he perceives in the sexual attraction, the natural result of which is the association of a male and a female for the preservation of species—an end not personal to either of them.

A psychologist would observe, first, that Comte uses the word