258 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
sociology as I did, I tried to get light from sociological writers. I studied Comte, but I found no light whatever. I have found no light from him whatever on any of the great problems I tried to study historically.
To give you an instance of what I refer to : I lived in France for a long time. I know that the young girl in France is a nonentity. She is not supposed to exist. The young man is not supposed to have any intercourse with her. That seemed to be most annoying, especially as I was a young man myself, and also most important from a higher standpoint. If the young man is not sup- posed to have any intercourse with the innocent girl, he will have intercourse with the young girl who is not innocent. That is a very grave question. Consider the French lyrics. Lyrics are supposed to have to do with the young man and the young girl. We write lyrical poems when we are twenty or twenty-five, and they come from the inspiration given by the young girl. Consequently France produces no true lyrics. French lyrics do not appeal to us strongly. They sound as prose, or they are addressed to persons whom we do not consider the right persons to address poetically. I asked sociologists :" How can you help me in this solution of these problems ? " but I found no help.
In history one must have very definite help. I venture to say that he alone accounts for the French Revolution who tells us why it broke out in 1789 and not in 1864, when France had been humiliated as she had never been humiliated before.
I found out that Buckle was mistaken in one thing at the bottom of history. He believed in laws. People were so much taken up with the triumphs of science ; they believed in physical and biological science, and thought the science of history must be modeled on these lines. It must have laws. Buckle was searching for laws. He thought that was the end of all wisdom. But I found out there were 1:0 historical laws. It would be a historical law if you could say the number of reigning dynasties in England are three ; therefore in Ireland there are so many that would be a law proper. But of such laws I have never been able to find a trace. History is a movement that is constantly going on. There is a creative synthesis in history as in life. Really history does not repeat itself. There is always some x that cannot be found in the analytical factors of that x. These x's are, of course, most difficult to account for. I did find some light in Hansen's book on the peculiar movement of people from the country to the town, in which he, on the basis of statistical data, comes to the conclusion that it is owing to the scope for greater energy in towns. That is somewhat of a guide, but in all the other problems I undertook I could not find any light. If sociology is a system, a concatenation of laws, I am afraid it can do very little for history. In history there are correlations, but not laws. Darwin mentions startling corre- lations in ordinary nature, such as that white cats with blue eyes are generally deaf. Huxley added many more, and Hackel I don't know how many. We cannot account for them. In the same way we have no laws of history, but only correlations of groups of facts. We can account for the Greeks having Olympian games. We can show the psychological connection with a few things. What we need in history is not so much sociology as psychology. I mean that we require to see very clearly the psychic forces and motives which are at work, and which account for events happening at the time they do and not at another time ; why, for example, the great Civil War broke out in 1642 and why not before. This is really what we need. Not so much classification of history, hut the introduction of the psychological view of facts ; not merely the outward facts, but the senti- ments and impressions which move people to create facts.
DR. SHADWORTH H. HODGSON.
I find myself in very considerable agreement with the remarks that have fallen from Professor Reich in one important respect, namely, on the subject of psychology. I think that the question before us today turns chiefly on the point of whether sociology it a science on its own basis, independent, aiming at some definitely defined purpose, and based upon some principle or set of principles connected closely together as its basis ; or whether, on the other hand, it is synonymous with what we call drawing lessons from a study of history. History
