44— THE SOCIOLOGY OF COMTE WITH SPECIAL 

 REFERENCE TO THE POLITICAL CONDITIONS 

 OF YOUNG COUNTRIES. 



Bv H. E. S. Fkemantlk, M.A., F.S.S. 



It is a melancholy fact that sixty )ears after the publication of 

 the last volume of the " Philosophic Positive " the name of the 

 science which Comte thought he had fliscovered, and which he re- 

 garded as the queen of all the sciences (Phil. Pos., VI.. 554) is still 

 an unfamiliar barbarism, and the science itself hardly admitted into 

 the hierarchy of sciences at all. "What is sociology?" said an 

 office-bearer of the South African Association for the Advancement 

 of Science, when the title appeared on the programme. As a pre- 

 face to one of the new volumes of the " Encyclopaedia Britannica " 

 there is an essay by Mr. Karl Pearson, who is known, amongst other 

 things, as a sociologist, on " The Function of Science in the Modern 

 State" (Vol. XXXII.). In it he ix)int.s out how certain character- 

 istics are inherited, how death-rates are selective that is, how death 

 and certain qualities go^ closely together how those who die early 

 have few children and 7>ice versa, how the factors of national 

 strength include vital, material, and moral wealth, how all these 

 need scientific fostering, hO'W desirable it is that the ladder leading 

 from class to class should be difficult tO' climb, how undesirable that 

 the proletariate should be intellectual, how carefully each class in 

 the State should be educated, and how necessary it is that there 

 should be an aristocrac) trained in State-craft. All these are matters 

 for Sociology to di.scuss. It has been defined as the " scientific 

 study of society, including all the .special Social Sciences." (Dic- 

 tionar}- of Philosophy and Psychology, ed. Baldwin.) It asks what is 

 done in the way of associaticm, how different races act in this re- 

 spect, what different forces are at play, and by what phenomena they 

 are attended, and what special ])roblems .wciety presents to p.sych- 

 ology, to ethics, and to metai>hysics. 



This is a vast field of inquiry, and the .subject is s[)ecially diffi- 

 cult to study, consisting as it does of a fleeting ])hantasmagoria of 

 events which never recur. Science itself is bewildered at such a 

 task, and there is a paramount necessity for dividing the question 

 further. As a rule, science begins with sim2)le questions ])ut to it 

 I)) practical experience, and, as a fact, sociology does onh advance 

 by obeying the Roman injunction, " Divide et impera." History 

 asks how particular nations conduct their connnon life. Science 

 prefers to take particular motives, and asks what will be the mutual 

 relations of men actuated by some such motive, and how may a 

 man with such a motive best gain his end among men of ordinary 

 disposition. The two sciences which have been organised as a 

 result of asking such abstract questions are Political Economv and 



