i 3 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



erated by processes of growth and development continuing through 

 centuries. Ignoring, as the first view tacitly does, that conformity to 

 law, in the scientific sense of the word, which the second view tacitly 

 asserts, there can be but little community between the methods of in- 

 quiry proper to them respectively. Continuous causation, which in 

 the one case there is little or no tendency to trace, becomes, in the 

 other case, the chief object of attention ; whence it follows that there 

 must be formed wholly different ideas of the appropriate modes of in- 

 vestigation. A foregone conclusion respecting the nature of social 

 phenomena is thus inevitably implied in any suggestions for the study 

 of them. 



While, however, it must be admitted that throughout these articles 

 there runs the assumption that the facts, simultaneous and successive, 

 which societies present, have a genesis no less natural than the genesis 

 of facts of all other classes, it is not admitted that this assumption 

 was made unawares, or without warrant. At the outset, the grounds 

 for it were examined. The notion, widely accepted in name, though 

 not consistently acted upon, that social phenomena differ from phenom- 

 ena of most other kinds, as being under special providence, we found 

 to be entirely discredited by its expositors ; nor, when closely looked 

 into, did the great-man-theory of social affairs prove to be more tenable. 

 Besides finding that. both these views, rooted as they are in the ways 

 of thinking natural to primitive men, would not bear criticism, we 

 found that even their defenders continually betrayed their beliefs in 

 the production of social changes by natural causes — tacitly admitted 

 that after certain antecedents certain consequents are to be expected — 

 tacitly admitted, therefore, that some prevision is possible, and there- 

 fore some subject-matter for science. 



From these negative justifications for the belief that sociology is a 

 science, we turned to the positive justifications. We found that every 

 aggregate of units, of any order, has certain traits necessarily deter- 

 mined by the properties of its units. Hence it was inferable, a priori, 

 that, given the natures of the men who are their units, and certain 

 characters in the societies formed are predetermined — other characters 

 being determined by the cooperation of surrounding conditions. The 

 current assertion, that sociology is not possible, implies a misconcep- 

 tion of its nature. Using the analogy supplied by a human life, we 

 saw that just as bodily development, and structure, and function, fur- 

 nish subject-matter for biological science, though the events set forth 

 by the biographer go beyond its range, so, social growth, and the rise 

 of structures and functions accompanying it, furnish subject-matter for 

 a science of society, though the facts with which historians fill their 

 pages mostly yield no material for science. Thus conceiving the scope 

 of the science, we saw, on comparing rudimentary societies with one 

 another, and with societies in different stages of progress, that they do 

 present certain common traits of structure and of function, as well 



