646 eepoet— 1878. 



and, instead of a human anatomy and physiology, construct a cardiology, a hepat- 

 ology, an enterology. It is not of course meant that special studies of particular 

 organs and functions may not he undertaken — that they may not he temporarily 

 and provisionally separated from each other in our researches ; hut the fact insisted 

 on is, that it is essential to keep in view their relations and interactions, and that 

 therefore they must be treated as •forming part of the subject-matter of one and 

 the same science. And what is thus true of theory is also true of practice — the 

 physician who had studied only one organ and its function would be very untrust- 

 worthy even in the therapeutics of that organ. lie who treats every disease as 

 purely local, without regard to the general constitution, is a quack ; and he who 

 ignores the mutual action of the physique and the moral in disease, is not properly 

 a physician, but a veterinary. 



These considerations are just as applicable, mutatis mutandis, to the study of 

 society, which is in so many respects kindred to biology. The most characteristic 

 fact about what is well called the social system, is the consensus of its different 

 functions ; and the treatment of these functions as independent is sure to land us 

 in theoretic and practical error. ' There is one great science of Sociology; its 

 several chapters study the several faces of social existence. One of these faces is 

 that of the material well-being of society, its industrial constitution and develop- 

 ment. The study of these phenomena is one chapter of Sociology, a chapter which 

 must be kept in close relation with the rest. 



The justice of this view is clearly seen when we consider the two-fold aspect of 

 Sociology as statical and dynamical — that is, as dealing on the one hand with 

 laws of coexistence, and on the other with laws of succession. As in biology we 

 have, alongside of the theory of the constitution and actions of an organism, the- 

 further theory of its development in time ; so in Sociology we have, beside the doc- 

 trine of the constitution and actions of society, the doctrine of its evolution from a 

 primitive to a higher condition. Now nothing is plainer than that in the course of 

 the human evolution the several social elements did not follow separate and in- 

 dependent processes of growth. The present economic state, for example, of the 

 nations of western Europe, as a group, or of any individual one amongst them,, 

 is the result of a great variety of conditions, many of them not in their own nature 

 economical at all. Scientific, moral, religious, political ideas and institutions have 

 all concurred in determining it. But if they worked in this manner in the past, it 

 follows that they are working so in the present. It is therefore impossible ration- 

 ally to conceive or explain the industrial economy of society without taking into, 

 account the other coexisting social factors. 



In nothing is the eminent superiority of Adam Smith more clearly seen than in 

 his tendency to comprehend and combine in his investigations all the different 

 aspects of social phenomena. Before the term " social science " had been spoken 

 or written, it could not be expected that he should have conceived adequately the 

 nature and conditions of that branch of inqvu'ry, much less founded it on definitive 

 bases — a task which was to be achieved more than fifty years later by the genius 

 of Conite. But he proceeded as far in this direction as it was possible to do under 

 the intellectual conditions of his time. In his ' Theory of Moral Sentiments ' he 

 promises to give in another discourse " an account of the general principles of law 

 and government, and of the different revolutions they have undergone in the dif- 

 ferent ages and periods of society, not only in what concerns justice, but in what 

 concerns police, revenue, and arrns, and whatever else is the subject of law."" 

 Here is no separation of politics, jurisprudence, and political economy, but rather 

 an anticipation, wonderful for his period, of general sociology, both ' statical and 

 dynamical — an anticipation which becomes more extraordinary still, when we 

 learn from his literary executors that he had formed the plan of a connected his- 

 tory of the liberal sciences and elegant arts, which would have supplied, in addition 

 to the social aspects already mentioned, a view of the intellectual progress of 

 society. _ Of this last undertaking there remains to us only the remarkable essay 

 on the history of astronomy, which is evidence at once of his thorough acquaint- 

 ance with that branch of science, and of his profound philosophical conceptions on 

 the nature of scientific inquiry in general. The other project too was never fully 



