November 11, 1904.] 



SCIENCE. 



633 



dozen different ones. The goal of social 

 evolution is a complex, iiexible, liberal or- 

 ganization, permitting the utmost liberty 

 and mobility to the individual, without im- 

 pairing the efficiency of organization as a 

 whole. 



On the methods of sociology remark at 

 this time must necessarily be brief. 



Dealing as we do with highly concrete 

 materials, we place our main reliance upon 

 systematic induction. The experimental 

 method of induction, however,- is of little 

 avail in the scientific study of society. 

 Although social experimenting is at all 

 times going on, it is difficult to isolate 

 causes or to control conditions with scien- 

 tific thoroughness. Observation, therefore, 

 and critically established records of obser- 

 vations made in bygone days, must be our 

 main dependence, so far as the accumula- 

 tion of data is concerned. 



Yet in a field so vast, observation itself 

 would be a fruitless toil if it were not di- 

 rected by scientific rules. Canons of guid- 

 ance we find in the so-called comparative 

 and historical methods. Selecting any so- 

 cial fact, or correlation of facts, observed 

 in any given society, we systematically 

 search for a corresponding fact or correla- 

 tion in all contemporaneous societies, ani- 

 mal and human, ethnic land civil. This 

 search has one clearly defined object, name- 

 ly, to determine whether the observed fact 

 is a universal, and therefore an essential, 

 an elementary phenomenon of society, and, 

 if it is not universal, to ascertain just how 

 wide its distribution is. By such research 

 we discover those resemblances and differ- 

 ences in social phenomena that are the 

 bases of scientific classification. 



Having in this manner arrived at a 

 scheme of classification, we use it in subse- 

 quent observation precisely as the chemist 

 or the botanist uses the classifications that 

 have been established in his science. We 



systematically look for the facts and the 

 correlations that the classification leads us 

 to anticipate. 



In like manner, following the historical 

 method, we search for a given social fact 

 at each stage in the historical evolution of 

 a given society, and thereby determine 

 what social phenomena are continuous. 



A complete scientific theory of natural 

 causation is established only when our 

 knowledge becomes quantitatively precise. 

 Often the law that we seek to formulate 

 eludes us until the correlations of phe- 

 nomena have been determined with mathe- 

 matical exactness. Sociology has unjustly 

 been reproached for neglecting that atten- 

 tion to precision which is the boast of other 

 sciences. The indictment of vagueness may 

 be a true bill against individual sociologists. 

 It is demonstrably not a true bill against 

 sociology. It is to the scientific students of 

 sociology that the world owes the discovery 

 and development of an inestimably valu- 

 able form of the comparative and historical 

 methods, namely, the statistical method. 

 Every inductive science to-day is adopting 

 this method. Physics, chemistry, astron- 

 omy and geology would be helpless without 

 it. The biologists have acknowledged their 

 dependence upon it by the establishment of 

 a statistical journal, Biometrica. It is not 

 too much to claim that the possibilities of 

 this now indispensable method of all the 

 sciences were first demonstrated in the 

 epoch-making social studies of Jaques Que- 

 telet, and that its employment in sociology 

 has been out of all proportion to its em- 

 ployment elsewhere. As developed in re- 

 cent years by Westergaard, the Dane; by 

 Germans, like Steinhauser, Lexis and Mey- 

 er ; by Italians, like Bodio ; by Frenchmen, 

 like Levasseur and Dumont; by English- 

 men, like Charles Booth, E. B. Tylor, Gal- 

 ton, Bowley and Karl Pearson; by Ameri- 

 cans, like Mayo-Smith, Weber, Norton, 

 Cattell, Thorndike and Boas, it has become, 



