BIOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY, AND SOCIOLOGY. 163 



THE RELATIONS OF BIOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY, AND 



SOCIOLGY. 



By HEEBEET SPENCEE. 



FROM time to time proof has come to me that in the United 

 States there have arisen erroneous conceptions of my views 

 concerning the connections between the sciences dealing respec- 

 tively with organic evolution and super-organic evolution. These 

 misconceptions will, if nothing be said, become established. Hence 

 it seems needful that I should point out how entirely at variance 

 with the evidence they are. The following extracts from two 

 leading American writers on Sociology will sufficiently exemplify 

 them. Mr. Lester Ward says : 



" The founder of sociology placed it next above biology in the scale of 

 diminishing generality and inci'easing 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 psy- 

 chology, 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 organ- 

 ism were those in which the nervous system was taken as the term of com- 

 parison. 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 com- 

 pared 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." 

 ("Sociology and Psychology." In American Journal of Sociology, vol. i. 

 No. 5, March, 1896.) 



In his recent work, published under the same title as my own. 

 The Principles of Sociology, Prof. Giddings recognizes the fact 

 that by me " the principles of sociology are derived from princi- 

 ples of psychology and of biology " (p. 8). But by his expressed 

 belief that " the time has come when its principles, accurately 

 formulated and adequately verified, can be organized into a coher- 

 ent theory" (p. 17), he tacitly implies that my own theory is not 

 coherent ; and he proceeds to supply that which he regards as the 

 needful bond an ultimate psychological bond. His words are : 

 "Accordingly, the sociological postulate can be no other than this, 

 namely : The original and elementary subjective fact in society is the con- 

 sciousness of kind. By this term I mean a state of consciousness in which 

 any being, whether low or high in the scale of life, recognizes another con- 

 scious being as of like kind with itself." {Ih.) 



And then on p. 19, after indicating the external conditions which 

 prompt social aggregations, he goes on to say : 



