and most richly endowed minds of our time,"[1] As Braga well says, he does not treat of sociology, but simply of folk-lore. But Letourneau, who points out other people's errors, cannot free himself from them and correct them. He has only tried, as he says, to write a single chapter of sociology, that is, the ethnographic. In writing thus he falls into open contradiction with what he says on a preceding page, where he says that ethnography is itself a science, independent of sociology, with which it has simply certain relations in so far as it furnishes the materials for the general synthesis of sociology.[2] This confusion of sociology with ethnography was made also by Bastian, who, Gumplowicz maintains, is superior to Herbert Spencer himself. Gumplowicz also falls into the same confusion, indirectly at least, by putting as he does among sociologists the ethnographers, Waitz, Gerlaud, Perty, Peschel, and the anthropologists Tyler and Gaspari. It is not strange, then, to find an Italian sociologist falling into the same error, and ending by asserting that sociology is ethnography. This is indeed the position of Professor Enrico Morselli, favorably known in Italy by his works, sociological, biological and anthropological, and who is a faithful follower of Spencer.
When Spencer defined sociology as "the science of society," he in reality left the science without a definition. It is not enough that he attempts to justify this definition by adding, "No other name sufficiently comprehensive exists," because as a matter of fact he is never careful to say just what he means by "society." His definition, in itself generic, becomes more so by his use of a term with a very elastic signification. In reality he makes a great mistake by neglecting a question of capital importance to sociology, that is, the evolution of social phenomena themselves.
Human society rests upon an individual basis. It is formed and transformed in correspondence with a utility strictly individ-
- ↑ Letourneau, La Sociologie, ed. 1892.
- ↑ "Il faut en effet que la sociologie repose sur les données empruntés á bien des sciences; á l'histoire naturelle, á l'anthropologie, á l'ethnographie, á la demographie, á la pedagogie, á l'ètude, des climats, á l'economie politique, á l'histoire, etc., op. cit.
