798 SOCIOLOGY 



On the methods of sociology, remark at this time must neces- 

 sarily be brief. 



Dealing as we do with highly concrete materials, we place our 

 main reliance upon systematic induction. The experimental method 

 of induction, however, is of little avail in the scientific study of 

 society. Although social experimenting is at all times going on, 

 it is difficult to isolate causes or to control conditions with scien- 

 tific thoroughness. Observation, therefore, and critically estab- 

 lished records of observations made in bygone days, must be our 

 main dependence, so far as the accumulation of data is concerned. 



Yet in a field so vast, observation itself would be a fruitless toil 

 if it were not directed by scientific rules. Canons of guidance we 

 find in the so-called comparative and historical methods. Select- 

 ing any social fact, or correlation of facts, observed in any given 

 society, we systematically search for a corresponding fact or cor- 

 relation in all contemporaneous societies, animal and human, 

 ethnic and civil. This search has one clearly defined object, namely, 

 to determine whether the observed fact is a universal, and there- 

 fore an essential, an elementary phenomenon of society, and, if 

 it is not universal, to ascertain just how wide its distribution is. 

 By such research we discover those resemblances and differences 

 in social phenomena that are the bases of scientific classification. 



Having in this manner arrived at a scheme of classification, we 

 use it in subsequent observation precisely as the chemist or the 

 botanist uses the classifications that have been established in his 

 science. We systematically look for the facts and the correlations 

 that the classification leads us to anticipate. 



In like manner, following the historical method, we search for 

 a given social fact at each stage in the historical evolution of a 

 given society, and thereby determine what social phenomena are 

 continuous. 



A complete scientific theory of natural causation is established 

 only when our knowledge becomes quantitatively precise. Often 

 the law that we seek to formulate eludes us until the correlations 

 of phenomena have been determined with mathematical exact- 

 ness. Sociology has unjustly been reproached for neglecting that 

 attention to precision which is the boast of other sciences. The 

 indictment of vagueness may be a true bill against individual so- 

 ciologists. It is demonstrably not a true bill against sociology. 

 It is to the scientific students of sociology that the world owes the 

 discovery and development of an inestimably valuable form of 

 the comparative and historical methods, namely, the statistical 

 method. Every inductive science to-day is adopting this method. 

 Physics, chemistry, astronomy, and geology, would be helpless 

 without it. The biologists have acknowledged their dependence 



