58 
THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY. 
Mae., 1891. 
THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY. 
BY MARY E. DALTON. 
( Concluded from page 28.) 
When the doctrines of Sociology were first formulated, 
and were found to include ethics, its claim to rank as a 
science was hotly disputed, because the doctrines of free will 
and of a moral sense were considered incompatible with 
complete reduction to the terms of physical science. The 
objection has been answered during the course of our study 
of the data of Sociology; we have seen that the moral suscep¬ 
tibilities of men are ordinary physical facts. We may go 
further, since, plainly, ethics cannot stand independently of 
politics. A delicate sympathy beats through every fibre of 
human association, and we trace the history of morality, not 
as something imposed by an external superhuman authority, 
but as the grown ideal which has been formed by humanity 
itself. The developed thought of the wisest and best of the 
race, even in primitive times, passed beyond the present, and 
saw not only what humanity could do and be as it was, but 
what it could do if all its units were wise and good beyond 
the measure they had reached; and as that ideal height of 
virtue was attained by the mass of mankind, it was raised 
still higher by the master-spirits of the age. Truth, wisdom, 
and righteousness came by painstaking, study, and striving, 
and our primitive ancestors, 
“ Groping blindly in the darkness, 
Touched God’s right hand in that darkness, 
And were lifted up and strengthened ; ” 
they, too, had “longings, yearnings, strivings, for the good 
they understood not;” and in their lower degree they, too, 
“ lived by admiration, hope, and love.” Horrible as Sociology 
shows the early state of our race to have been, our very com¬ 
parison between the present and that distant past is full ot 
the brightest encouragement to our highest hopes, and of the 
strongest incentives to constant effort in our attempt to help 
forward the work of the world. 
The political and religious controls of societies, and the 
work performed by them, constitute the two most important 
of the “co-ordinating structures and functions,” as Spencer 
calls them. In addition to these is a minor system of 
restraints which regulates the daily activities of the citizens. 
These restraints, more fitful, but real and lasting in the 
influence they exert over conduct, are also of the nature of 
ceremonial observances, and were originally closely allied to 
