224 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



Such a proceeding may amuse the dilletante ; it is not 

 scientific.^ 



Obviously, if we consider the evolution of religious beliefs, of 

 domestic institutions, of law and jurisprudence, of the economic 

 forms of society, of political doctrines, simply from an indi- 

 vidualist point of view, we can obtain no explanation either of 

 the essence of all these products of social intercourse, nor of their 

 influence. The sociologist must consider all these phenomena 

 as the result of social life. There is a tendency to confound the 

 psychophysical phenomenon with the psychological; and this 

 tendency leads to regrettable misunderstandings. The psycho- 

 physical phenomenon consists in the purely instinctive contact 

 of individuals brought together by the external conditions of 

 life, without having attained to that active consciousness of the 



' It is one thing to apply the method of the anterior and more general 

 sciences to the posterior and more specialised ones, another to reduce highly 

 specialised phenomena sui generis to simple derivations, more or less com- 

 plicated in their nature, of more general phenomena. When we say that 

 mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology, psychology, and 

 sociology, constitute the hierarchy of sciences ; that this hierarchy is based 

 on the degree of generality of the phenomena peculiar to each of these 

 sciences ; that the sciences whose sphere is more extended in space and 

 time contain those whose sphere is less extended ; and that consequently 

 mathematics, whose sphere is necessarily the most extended of all, because 

 all phenomena obey certain mathematical laws, and depend on mathe- 

 matical laws for their production, enter into the composition of all the other 

 sciences — when we say this, we mean, from the practical point of view of 

 the development of each science in particular, that the method employed 

 in mathematical research is pre-eminently suited to all scientific research 

 in all branches of science. The theoretical certainty that, in the hierarchy 

 of knowledge, the special is included in the general, and is subordinate to it, 

 entails the indispensable practical conclusion that the method employed 

 in the latter is also the method of the former. 



This view was also that of Auguste Comte, to whom we owe the enuncia- 

 tion of the admirable theory of the hierarchy of sciences. Writing with 

 especial reference to chemical phenomena, Comte says : " Any attempt to 

 include the problems of chemistry in the sphere of mathematical doctrines 

 must be characterised as profoundly irrational, and as being contrary to 

 the nature of things ; such an attempt could only result from vague and 

 essentially arbitrary hypotheses concerning the intimate constitution of 



