OF SOCIETY. 557 



fully used in the natural and especially the physical and 

 mechanical sciences. Both through the use of such 83. 



Sociology ; 



methods and still more by dealins; with special features -"^n^^^ 



J o r science. 



of social life, sociology has established itself as a separ- 

 ate and definite science in the same way as biology and 

 psychology had done respectively in the beginning and 

 the middle of the Nineteenth Century. The special 

 investigations are extremely valuable and interesting, 

 and have tended to attract a number of industrious and 

 successful workers, but they do not contribute much, if 

 anything, to the solution of the social problem as a 

 whole. As little as physics, chemistry, or the^ theory 

 of descent have enabled biologists to define the essence 

 of life, though they have taught us much about known 

 as well as previously unknown properties of living 

 matter ; as little as the discoveries in psycho-physics 

 have brought us nearer to an answer to the question as 

 to the essence of the soul or conscious principle ; as 

 little have these special investigations of social phe- 

 nomena helped us to answer the question. What is 

 the essence of human society ? But here we have, as 

 in biology, various attempts to define the whole pheno- 

 menon by laying undue stress upon one or other of 

 its features. Some of these attempts are interesting 

 and valuable. 



Again, merely as a matter of example, but without 

 any aim at completeness, I mention two of them ^ 



^ The two thinkers in question 

 are also representative of two oppo- 

 site views in the treatment of social 

 phenomena which we may term 

 the psycho-physical and the psycho- 

 logical. In the concluding chapter 



of an interesting Essay by M. C. 

 Bougie, ' Les Sciences Sociales en 

 Allemagne' (2nd ed., 1902), when 

 contrasting French with German 

 sociology, the author points to the 

 suspicion with which, under the 



