MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY. II. SOCIAL LAWS.
THE quick mastery of things that science assures us is due to the fact that science presents all comers with truth packed away in neat portable formulae. The strength of an ox in a tea-cup, the virtue of a beef-steak in a capsule, the healing power of a plant in a pellet such is the ideal of the investigator as he labors to establish laws. No branch is felt to possess in high degree the scientific quality unless it has found regularities and constant relations among the phenomena it contemplates. In dealing with the more complex phenomena, to be sure, some of the precision and absoluteness of physical and chemical laws must be renounced. Out of the tangled skein we shall rarely get anything better than an empirical law. Few, indeed, are the formulae that can be so phrased as to hold for all occasions and circumstances. But this has not discouraged the biologist or the sociologist from trying to distil into vest-pocket phials the tinc- ture and essence of innumerable cases. It is our present pur- pose to sample and test the shelf of phials purporting to contain the quintessences of social facts.
Sociology differs from its older sister sciences in that it was built by great synthesists Comte, Spencer, Lilienfeld, Schaffle, de Roberty, and Fouillee all of them more renowned for their wide acquaintance with many provinces of knowledge than for their close familiarity with any particular division of social facts. In their spacious philosophic surveys, all of them came upon the same great cantle of unknown territory, and in their endeavor to stake off and explore this expanse they created sociology. It is true this region was not quite a wilderness, having been occupied in spots by the economists. But to their achievements the philosophers paid about as much heed as the early explorers of America paid to the constructions of the mound-builders.
The philosophers, no doubt, hastened the day of sociology, but they burdened the infant science with two faulty methods.
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