to understand the true scope of that science. This is specially important because there exists considerable confusion upon this point. The greatest difficulty has been that of distinguishing it from political ecomony or economics. It has naturally happened that it fell to teachers of that science to take up sociology also and give instructions in that, and from the long recognition of economics as a necessary branch of learning and the recent appearance of sociology upon the scene it has been concluded by some that this young aspirant for a place in the curriculum must necessarily be some subordinate outgrowth of the older science. But from the considerations already set forth it is obvious that this is an erroneous view. Comte's conception is of course widely different, as he makes it one of the great coordinate groups of his so-called hierarchy and as such to embrace everything that pertains to man as a social being, But before considering this claim let us examine the views of one of the foremost political economists of the world, Mr. John Stuart Mill, and this at a date anterior to the publication of Comte's name or his method. Mill saw that there was a great science of society as yet unnamed and undefined, and in striving after these two ends he used the three expressions: "social economy," "speculative politics," and "the science of politics," and then proceeded to define the scope of this great science as follows:
This science stands in the same relation to the social, as anatomy and physiology to the physical body. It shows by what principles of his nature man is induced to enter into a state of society; how this feature of his position acts upon his interests and feelings, and through them upon his conduct; how the association tends progressively to become closer, and the cooperation extends itself to more and more purposes; what those purposes are, and what the varieties of means most generally adopted for furthering them; what are the various relations which establish themselves among men as the ordinary consequence of the social union; what those which are different in different states of society; and what are the effects of each upon the conduct and character of man.[1]
- ↑ J. S. Mill: "On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Philosophical Investigation in that Science.—London and Westminster Review, Vol. XXVI, October, 1836, p. 11. Reprinted with slight modifications as the fifth of his Essays on some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy, 1844, p. 135.
