PRESENT POSITION OF SOCIOLOGY. 813 



art, and ethics applied." After worrying over these oracular epi- 

 grams it is refreshing to be told by another teacher that " the relation 

 of sociology to political economy, history, etc., is close.'' 1 



It would be superfluous to cite further illustrations of the unset- 

 tled state of sociological thought. The quotations that have been 

 made show conclusively that the accredited representatives of the 

 new " science " are at loggerheads upon fundamental questions. This 

 fact the sociologists themselves readily admit. The author of a re- 

 cent treatise on sociology speaks of the " confusion and perplexity 

 among its teachers, and declares that its forms are as yet varied, and 

 perhaps would suggest a series of pseudo-sciences instead if one genu- 

 ine science." * Even Professor Giddings confesses in the preface of 

 his Principles of Sociology that " much sociology is as yet nothing 

 more than careful and suggestive guesswork." Professor Small, of 

 the University of Chicago, in his Introduction to the Study of So- 

 ciety, speaks of sociology as an " inchoate science," and remarks that 

 " only ignoramuses, incompetent to employ the method of any sci- 

 ence, could claim for sociology the merit of a completed system." 



Sociologists themselves, then, confess that differences of opinion 

 exist among them. Let us look more carefully at the nature of these 

 differences. They relate to the scope, the method, the object, and 

 the ground-principles of the " science." 



The province of sociology is defined by some very broadly, to 

 include the whole range of the phenomena of human association. By 

 others the scope of the study is limited to a narrower range of social 

 phenomena. Among the latter, again, there are some who would 

 identify sociology with the study of social origins, or the genesis of 

 social institutions. Others would restrict sociology to a study of the 

 history and function of the family. Still others understand by soci- 

 ology merely the pathology of society, devoting themselves to the 

 diagnosis of social diseases, as crime and pauperism. 



Professor Giddings has called attention ^to the natural tendency 

 on the part of each social philosopher to create a sociology in the 

 image of his professional specialty. " To the economist," he says, 

 " sociology is a penumbral political economy a scientific outer dark- 

 ness for inconvenient problems and obstinate facts that will not live 

 peaceably with well-bred formulas. To the alienist and the criminal 

 anthropologist it is a social pathology. To the ethnologist it is that 

 subdivision of his own science which supplements the account of 

 racial traits by a description of social organization. To the compara- 

 tive mythologist and the student of folklore it is an account of the 

 evolution of culture." 



The narrower conceptions of sociology, however, have been dis- 



* Fairbanks. Introduction to Sociology, p. 1. 



