Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 61.djvu/119

Rh the whole range of experience and of scientific thought is before it. But the question is—how can this object be laid hold of? The spontaneous, unreflecting attitude of mind is confessedly beyond the reach of investigation. And if by reflection we endeavor to describe and to explain the mental life, do we not construct for our own purposes an object which is more or less artificial?

This criticism implies no skeptical tendency. It surely will not deter psychologists from their work of investigating the more subtle elementary processes of mind, its unfolding in the individual and its relations to the complex activities of its environment.

O far as the definition of sociology is concerned, it is simply the science of society, or the science of social phenomena. All the more specific definitions that have been proposed have created more confusion than they have cleared up. What is needed in sociology is not definitions, but a clear presentation of the scientific principles underlying it. There is one such principle, failure to recognize which causes most of the difficulty in endeavoring to establish the science. This principle, however, is one that also applies to psychology, biology, and all the other sciences classed as 'complex'—to the biological sciences and the moral sciences. This principle may be formulated as follows:

In the complex sciences the quality of exactness is only perceptible in their higher generalizations.

Or, since exactness, i. e., uniformity, invariableness, reliability, etc., is what constitutes scientific law, the same truth may be simplified and reduced to the following form:

Scientific laws increase in generality as the sciences to which they, apply increase in complexity.

In sociology, therefore, which is the most complex of the sciences, the laws must be the most highly generalized. I shall not attempt to do more here than bring forward a few illustrations of the above propositions. It is clear that the method of sociology is essentially that of generalization, i. e., of grouping phenomena and using the groups as units. Nature works by this method, for example, in chemistry, where it is believed that the higher compounds have as their units compounds of lower orders.

Social phenomena are obtrusive, ever-present, multitudinous. Their very proximity is a bar to their full comprehension. This I have called 'the illusion of the near,' and likened it to trying to see a city