Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 61.djvu/121

Rh that fires, and railroad accidents, and mine disasters, and boiler explosions, and robberies, and defalcations, and murders, and the whole list of events that make up the daily news, were normal social phenomena. Nearly every one of them has occurred nearly every day in nearly every country in the world during the lives of us all and those of our fathers and grandfathers. But this enormous mass of evidence has no effect whatever in dispelling the popular illusion that such events are extraordinary. There is nothing new in 'news' except a difference in the names. The events are always the same. All this applies equally to those larger events that make up the bulk of what is popularly understood as human history. Viewed from the stand-point of sociology, history contains nothing new. It is the continual repetition of the same thing under different names. This is what is meant by generalization. We have only to carry it far enough in order to arrive at unity. Society is a domain of law and sociology is an abstract science in the sense that it does not attend to details except as aids in arriving at the law that underlies them all.

We may call this the sociological perspective. It is the discovery of law in history, whether it be the history of the past or the present, and including under history social as well as political phenomena. There is nothing very new in this. It is really the oldest of all sociological conceptions. The earliest gropings after a social science consisted in a recognition of law in human affairs. The so-called precursors of sociology have been those who have perceived more or less distinctly a method or order in human events. All who have done this, however dimly, have been set down as the heralds of the new science. Such adumbrations of the idea of law in society were frequent in antiquity. They are to be found in the sayings of Socrates and the writings of Aristotle. Lucretius sparkles with them. In medieval times they were more rare, and we scarcely find them in St. Augustine, but Ibn Khaldoun, a Sarracen of Tunis, in the fourteenth century gave clear expression to this conception. His work, however, was lost sight of until recently, and Vico, who wrote at the close of the seventeenth century and beginning of the eighteenth, was long regarded as the true forerunner of Montesquieu. Still, there were many others both before and after Vico, and passages have been found reflecting this general truth in the writings of Machiavelli, Bruno, Campanella, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Ferguson, Fontenelle, Buffon, Turgot, Condorcet, Leibnitz, Kant, Oken, etc.

The theologically inclined, when this truth was brought home to them, characterized it by the phrase 'God in history,' and saw in the order of events the divine hand guiding the acts of men toward some predestined goal. This is perhaps the most common view to-day outside of science. But science deals with phenomena. Sociology therefore