292 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. III. No. 60. 



the direct continuation northward of the Chesa- 

 peake formation of the Middle Atlantic slope. 

 W. B. Claek. 



SOCIETIES AND ACADEMIES. 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OP WASHING- 

 TON, FEBRUARY 1. 



Mr. Lester F. Ward read a paper on ' The 

 Filiation of the Sciences.' The purpose of the 

 paper was to trace the progress of the concep- 

 tion of a natural order of development for the 

 larger groups of phenomena, as distinguished, 

 on the one hand, from any attempt at a logical 

 classification of the sciences, and on the other, 

 from the consideration of the order in which the 

 sciences have been historically developed. With- 

 out going back of the present century to deal 

 with the more or less fanciful notions of the 

 Ancients or of such moderns as Oken, Hegel, 

 d'Alembert, Hobbes, Locke, etc., he drew atten- 

 tion to the views of Auguste Comte and Herbert 

 Spencer,as the two philosophers who had clearly 

 conceived the problem of natural evolution. 



He first traced the development of the idea 

 in the mind of the first of these writers from 

 1820 to 1842. In a paper published by him in 

 1820, he had quite clearly expressed the funda- 

 mental truth, and arranged the great groups of 

 phenomena, or sciences, in the following order: 

 1, Mathematics; 2, Astronomy; 3, Physics; 4, 

 Chemistry; 5, Physiology; giving to each of 

 these terms a wide meaning, but admitting that 

 mathematics was not coordinate with the others, 

 but was only the criterion by which each of the 

 others was to be judged and its position in the 

 se.ries fixed. From 1826 to 1829 he elaborated 

 this scheme in a course of lectures, soon after 

 published as his well-known work on Positive 

 Philosophy, the first volume of which appeared 

 in 1830. In the prospectus of these lectures, 

 circulated in manuscript form in 1826, he added 

 to the above five sciences a sixth, viz.. Social 

 Physics, and the scheme as then drawn up was 

 introduced in tabular form at the beginning of 

 the first volume of the Positive Philosophy. In 

 Vol. III. of that work, which appeared in 1838, 

 he substituted for his ' Physiology ' Lamarck's 

 term Biology, but the scope of this science was 

 the same as before and practically that of biology 

 as now understood. The last chapter of that 



volume was devoted to what he called the intel- 

 lectual and moral, or cerebral, functions of life, 

 in which he fully recognized the present science 

 of psychology, but denied that it could be pro- 

 perly separated from biology. In the fourth 

 volume, published in 1839, he speaks of this as 

 ' Transcendental Biology.' It is in this volume, 

 too, that he first proposed the term ' Sociology,' 

 as the exact equivalent of his ' Social Physics,' 

 and continued to the end to use both these 

 terms interchangeably. It was not till 1842, 

 with the appearance of the first volume of his 

 Positive Polity {Politique Positive), that he added 

 anything to the scheme of sciences thus drawn 

 up. He then recognized, as the seventh and 

 last term of the series, the science of Ethics. 

 The entire series, then, as he finally left it, was 

 as follows: 1, Mathematics; 2, Astronomy; 3, 

 Physics ; 4, Chemistry; 5, Biology (including 

 cerebral or transcendental biology); 6, Soci- 

 ology; 7, Ethics. 



Comte was at great pains to explain that this 

 series represented the true order of nature, 

 and that the phenomena corresponded to the 

 actual evolution that has taken place in the 

 universe. The degree of ' positivity ' of any 

 science' is that to which it can be reduced to 

 mathematical laws. The first of the sciences 

 that represent phenomena, viz., astronomy 

 (from which sidereal astronomy was excluded) 

 is therefore the most positive, and the degree 

 of positivity diminishes with each term in the 

 series. The sciences thus arranged also dimin- 

 ish in their generality while they increase in 

 their complexity. 



Moreover, each higher science has its roots in 

 the one next below it and is, as it were, de- 

 rived from it. The relationship is genetic, and 

 hence his favorite term 'filiation,' a word 

 much better chosen than the term ' hierarchy' 

 which he also applied to the system. 



Mr. Ward next proceeded to consider the 

 scheme of Mr. Herbert Spencer as elaborated in 

 his Synthetic Philosophy. A prospectus of that 

 work was circulated in 1860. It was to em- 

 brace one volume on First Principles, two vol- 

 umes on the Principles of Biology, two volumes 

 on the Principles of Psychology, three volumes 

 on the Principles of Sociology, and two volumes 

 on the Principles of Morality. In this pro- 



