SOCIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. V.
In our efforts to fix the true position of sociology we have now considered its relations to cosmology, biology, and anthropology. It remains to consider its relations to psychology. The founder of sociology placed it next above biology in the scale of diminishing generality and increasing complexity, and maintained that it had that science as its natural basis and as the substratum into which its roots penetrated. Herbert Spencer, although he treated psychology as a distinct science and placed it between biology and sociology in his system of Synthetic Philosophy, made no attempt to affiliate sociology upon psychology, while on the contrary he did exert himself to demonstrate that it has exceedingly close natural affinities with biology, as was shown in the third paper. At the close of that paper the fact came clearly forth that almost the only legitimate comparisons between society and a living organism were those in which the nervous system was taken as the term of comparison. In other words, it was clear even then that the class of attributes in the individual animal with which those of society could best be compared were its psychic attributes. If we are to have a science of psychology distinct from biology these attributes belong to that science, and hence it is really psychology and not biology upon which sociology directly rests. I hope to show the importance of this truth both from the purely logical and also from the wholly practical side.
Psychology, as the science of mind, embraces the entire field of psychic phenomena. This field is not restricted to the purely intellectual operations which have formed the exclusive subject of philosophy until a quite recent date, nor even to the more enlarged field of the senses and the intellect embraced in more modern works; it reaches out and gathers to its fold that other
