DEFINITION OF SOME MODERN SCIENCES. 115 



that fires, and railroad accidents, and mine disasters, and boiler ex- 

 plosions, and robberies, and defalcations, and murders, and the whole 

 list of events that make up the daily news, were normal social phe- 

 nomena. Nearly every one of them has occurred nearly every day in 

 nearly every country in the world during the lives of us all and those 

 of our fathers and grandfathers. But this enormous mass of evi- 

 dence has no effect whatever in dispelling the popular illusion that 

 such events are extraordinary. There is nothing new in 'news' except 

 a difference in the names. The events are always the same. All this 

 applies equally to those larger events that make up the bulk of what 

 is popularly understood as human history. Viewed from the stand- 

 point of sociology, history contains nothing new. It is the continual 

 repetition of the same thing under different names. This is what is 

 meant by generalization. We have only to carry it far enough in order 

 to arrive at unity. Society is a domain of law and sociology is an 

 abstract science in the sense that it does not attend to details except 

 as aids in arriving at the law that underlies them all. 



We may call this the sociological perspective. It is the discovery of 

 law in history, whether it be the history of the past or the pres- 

 ent, and including under history social as well as political phe- 

 nomena. There is nothing very new in this. It is really the 

 oldest of all sociological conceptions. The earliest gropings after 

 a social science consisted in a recognition of law in human affairs. 

 The so-called precursors of sociology have been those who have 

 perceived more or less distinctly a method or order in human 

 events. All who have done this, however dimly, have been set down as 

 the heralds of the new science. Such adumbrations of the idea of law 

 in society were frequent in antiquity. They are to be found in the 

 sayings of Socrates and the writings of Aristotle. Lucretius sparkles 

 with them. In medieval times they were more rare, and we scarcely find 

 them in St. Augustine, but Ibn Khaldoun, a Sarracen of Tunis, in the 

 fourteenth century gave clear expression to this conception. His work, 

 however, was lost sight of until recently, and Vico, who wrote at the 

 close of the seventeenth century and beginning of the eighteenth, was 

 long regarded as the true forerunner of Montesquieu. Still, there were 

 many others both before and after Vico, and passages have been found 

 reflecting this general truth in the writings of Machiavelli, Bruno, 

 Campanella, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Ferguson, 

 Fontenelle, Buffon, Turgot, Condorcet, Leibnitz, Kant, Oken, etc. 



The theologically inclined, when this truth was brought home to 

 them, characterized it by the phrase 'God in history/ and saw in the 

 order of events the divine hand guiding the acts of men toward some 

 predestined goal. This is perhaps the most common view to-day outside 

 of science. But science deals with phenomena. Sociology therefore 



