ch. vin.] ORGANIZATION OF TIJE SCIENCES. 213 



concrete conditions of existence of living organisms which 

 lies at the bottom of the whole. The laws of nutrition, 

 reproduction and innervation are not abstract laws, con- 

 sidered apart from the conditions in which they are realized, 

 like the law of inertia in physics, or the law of definite 

 proportions in chemistry. They are realized in each concrete 

 instance just as much as certain chemical and physical laws 

 are realized in each concrete instance of mineralogy. Or, in 

 other words, the laws of biology are derivative uniformities, 

 while the laws of physics and chemistry are original unifor- 

 mities. Given the general laws of molecular combination 

 and decombination, and given also a certain definite organiza- 

 tion placed in a given environment, and the laws of nutrition, 

 reproduction and innervation follow. Take away the definite 

 organization, and you have nothing left but the laws of 

 molecular rearrangement, which are the subjects of physics 

 and chemistry. This is not identifying biology with physics 

 and chemistry. The fact of organization remains, by the 

 study of which biology is an independent science. But it is 

 a concrete science, since it can study organization only as 

 actually exemplified in particular organisms. The same is 

 true of sociology, which is simply an extension of the 

 principles of biology and psychology to the complex 

 phenomena furnished by the mutual reactions of intelligent 

 organisms upon each other. There is no abstract science of 

 sociology which leaves out of sight the special complications 

 arising from the interaction of concrete, actually-existing 

 communities. Any such abstract science is a mere figment 

 of the imagination, born of Comte's excessive passion for 

 systematizing. The science of sociology is the generalization 

 of the concrete phenomena of society, as recorded in history ; 

 and, in the widest sense, the laws of sociology are the laws 

 of history. And, travelling back to the other end of the 

 series, a similar criticism must be made upon astronomy. 

 This science is an application of molar physics (and latterly, 



