tion of these sciences. Next, it demanded the answer to the enigma from the particular social sciences. Finally, after having concluded, with Karl Marx and A. Loria, for example, that the most general interpretation must be economic, it arrived, by a true law of apparent return to the origin, at the knowledge that the interpretation of the social world must be sought from the whole, both of inorganic and organic nature, of which the societies are the spontaneous development; and, at the same time, from the ensemble of the seven classes of social phenomena, in the order of importance which their hierarchic classification has revealed to us. In short, sociology can be only an integral conception of the highest combination formed by the inorganic and organic factors, land and population, in the many social forms.
Our work would be incomplete if we did not also mention, as the fourth and last affluent of positive sociology, the contributions of the scientific specialists who have consecrated their labors to the study of one or more of the seven classes of particular sciences, including the elementary and abstract as well as the formal and concrete. Among these contributions, before all others, are those of the economic scientists, who belong to the sociological school because of their method, and because they never lose sight of the correlation of economics with the whole of social science. In particular, it is necessary to recall the works of A. Thierry, disciple of Saint-Simon, those of John Stuart Mill, de Laveleye, Fustel de Coulanges, Wagner, Mommsen, Paul Viollet, Morgan, H. Sumner Maine, Max Müller, etc., etc. All, in their different specialties, are sociologists; it is chiefly by their works, which serve as an intermediary between elementary sociology (represented by comparative and co-ordinated statics) on the one hand, and general sociology on the other, that the latter science is destined to be perfected through the continued progress of studies relating to the structure and evolution of particular institutions and societies.[1]
- ↑ In our Elementary Sociology there is a methodical list of many works whose study we recommend to those who are preparing themselves for the study of general sociology. (Bruxelles: F. Larcier, 1894-95.)
