November 16, 1917] 



SCIENCE 



471 



plains much of their unsettled condition 

 and of the lack of harmony among their de- 

 votees. Nevertheless, this does not explain 

 all. There are other conditions which ex- 

 plain the present backwardness of the social 

 sciences, which are more remediable, and 

 which it should be the object of this so- 

 ciety to aid in removing. It is the purpose 

 of this paper to point these out, and I be- 

 lieve that the chief among them is the fail- 

 ure of the leaders of the social sciences to 

 develop an adequate, sound and generally 

 accepted scientific method. Scientific 

 method may not be very important in the 

 laboratory sciences where mechanical in- 

 struments of precision often take the place 

 of methods of reasoning; but in the social 

 sciences "a sound method is alone compe- 

 tent to the uniform and constant discrimi- 

 nation of truth from error." As has been 

 well said, what the microscope is to biol- 

 ogy, or the telescope to astronomy, that a 

 sound scientific method is to the social sci- 

 ences. In other words, the tendency toward 

 methodological "fads" or one-sidedness is 

 one of the most serious impediments to the 

 development of the social sciences, and at 

 the same time one most easily removable. 



What, then, may be regarded as a sound 

 and adequate method for the social sci- 

 ences? My thesis is that such a method 

 must be an extension and an adaptation of 

 the methods employed by the so-called nat- 

 ural sciences. If it be objected that this 

 means materialism or at least "mechanistic 

 interpretation" in the social sciences, the 

 replj' is that this is a mistake. Science 

 builds itself upon no universal, a priori 

 hj'pothesis. People who try to make it do 

 so are imbued with the metaphysical rather 

 than with the scientific spirit. The spirit 

 and the method of all true science is mat- 

 ter-of-fact, inductive and pragmatic, not 

 deductive and dogmatic. It takes the world 

 as it finds it, correcting common sense only 

 as it is shown to be in error. It explains 



phenomena, not by reference to some uni- 

 versal abstract principle, such as mechan- 

 ical causation, but by describing fully all 

 the conditions essential to their appearance. 

 But this is exactly what the social sciences 

 do also. They also seek to explain the phe- 

 nomena with which they deal by observing 

 and describing all the conditions which 

 seem to be in any way connected with their 

 appearance. Science is therefore one, even 

 though reality may be complex; and the 

 same general spirit pervades all science, 

 even though different methods of investiga- 

 tion and research have to be developed and 

 applied in different realms of phenomena. 

 Moreover, inasmuch as the universe is in- 

 terdependent in all its parts and forms a 

 working unity, it follows, as Comte long 

 ago pointed out, and as every worker in the 

 natural sciences practically acknowledges, 

 that the more complex sciences are depend- 

 ent upon the less complex, and the more 

 specialized upon the more general. 



An immediate corollary from these con- 

 clusions is that the social sciences should 

 preserve the point of view and utilize the 

 results of the natural sciences ; that is, they 

 should preserve the same matter-of-fact 

 method and build themselves upon the 

 antecedent sciences as their basis. This is 

 in no sense to surrender the inductive spirit 

 of science. The inductive spirit is behind 

 all science, and when a worker in a more 

 complex science borrows a principle or a 

 truth from a simpler science and applies it 

 in his own field, he is not thereby giving up 

 the inductive spirit of science, even though 

 for the time being he is working deduc- 

 tively. For there is no reason why a stu- 

 dent of society should have to work out for 

 himself independently truths which have 

 already been discovered through inductive 

 processes by investigators in other realms. 

 The true inductive spirit is not opposed to 

 the proper use of deduction. "What passes 

 for induction in the social sciences — the 



