CHAPTER II GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS ON SOCIAL SCIENCE

 Social science had at first been called social physics by Comte. Later on he invented the name of “sociology”228 for it. It stands at the summit of the encyclop?dic ladder of the sciences. Accordingly, it offers certain characteristics which the other sciences do not present.   Undoubtedly, by the definition of its object and by its method, it is perfectly homogeneous with the rest of positive knowledge. Sociology studies the laws of social phenomena as mathematics inquires into the laws of geometrical phenomena. In this sense, between these extreme sciences there are no other differences than those which arise from the diversity of the phenomena which are studied. But mathematics, and the other fundamental sciences, excepting sociology, are distinctly preliminary. Sociology is final. Each of the preliminary sciences should be cultivated only in the measure necessary in order that the following one may in turn assume the positive form. Social science, which is not preparatory to any other, establishes the principles of morals and of politics. It is, as has been seen, the key-stone of positive philosophy. It is in it, and through it, that positive philosophy acquires the universality which hitherto it had lacked.   Finally, there is a last difference which Comte likes to think he is successfully removing; the other sciences are more231 or less formed; everything has to be done for social science. Not that many trials have not been attempted. Comte does not ignore them, and he prides himself upon doing justice to his precursors. He goes back to Aristotle, in whom he admires an incomparable scientific and philosophical genius. In him he sees the inventor of social statics. His Politics are still read with profit.229 But Aristotle could have no idea of a sociology, and in particular of positive social dynamics. For that he lacked (without speaking of the fundamental sciences which excepting mathematics were yet to be born), a sufficiently wide and varied knowledge of history and the idea of progress.   Montesquieu was in advance of his time, when, by the insight of his genius, he generalised the idea of natural law so as to bring under it the political, judicial, economical, and, generally speaking, all social phenomena. He really conceives the idea of social science. But the execution did not respond to the conception. How could Montesquieu have succeeded, since he was still without two indispensable elements: in the first place, the positive science of man from the biological point of view, and then the idea of progress, a vital necessity for every positive philosophy of history? Having failed to apprehend the fundamental laws of social dynamics, Montesquieu made too much use of the comparative method. Consequently, he took secondary laws for essential laws, such as the laws relating to the influence of climate. In the same way he has exaggerated the importance of various forms of political constitution.230   Condorcet came after Montesquieu and Turgot, and had been formed in the school of d’Alembert. He came nearer than anyone to the social science which was to be founded. He understood admirably that the evolution of the human232 race, considered as a single being, is subject to laws. He brought the idea of progress into full daylight. But, nevertheless, positive sociology does not owe to him its origin. He shared the prejudice of his time on the subject of the indefinite perfectibility of man; this prejudice was only to disappear before the positive science of intellectual and moral man. Moreover, in the heat of the revolutionary conflict, he misunderstood the concrete reality of the progress, whose abstract necessity he had so well realised. By painting the centuries preceding the XVIII. century, in the darkest colours, he made the progressive evolution of humanity a kind of miracle, “doubly inadmissible in a doctrine which does not imply a Providence.”231   But soon Cabanis and Gall bring forward the positive theory of the moral and intellectual faculties of man. The French revolution throws a vivid light upon the period which separates us from the Middle Ages. At last, the theorists of the counter-Revolution show that the philosophy of the XVIII. century, if it excelled in the power of demolishing, was incapable of reconstructing, and they also show that order must be inseparable from progress. Comte regards himself as a Condorcet who has profited by these lessons of experience. He has worked with Saint-Simon, he has read De Maistre. In short, he is possessed of all the necessary elements for the foundation of sociology.   At the moment when he undertakes it, theological and metaphysical philosophy is still dominant over the contemporary conception of social facts. In it imagination is not subordinated to observation. Men do not apply themselves to the analysis of facts in order to discover their relations and their laws; they prefer to construct philosophies of history, which appear as non-scientific hypotheses, that is to say, which are not verifiable. Absolute results are sought233 for, as if in this order of facts, as in all the others, the absolute was not inaccessible. From the practical point of view, nobody doubts that man can modify social facts as he pleases, and that his action can be exercised there without any definite limits being placed upon it. It is supposed, in a word, that political society has no laws which regulate its natural development.   The same prejudices and the same false ideas have already predominated in the past on the subject of the more simple phenomena, which afterwards became objects of positive science. Should not this analogy cause philosophers to conceive “the rational hope of also succeeding in the dissipation of those errors of conception and of method in the system of political ideas.”232 Nothing is more natural than that the science of the most complex phenomena should be the last to reach the positive stage. It would even have been impossible for it to have been otherwise. Finally, beyond the difficulties which belong to the complexity of its object, sociology had to overcome others, which arise from political passions. Problems of this kind are indifferent to no one. In them the interests of each one are involved, and they influence even without our knowledge, the direction taken by our thoughts. Political parties excel in framing plausible theories adapted to their requirements. Thus a constant effort at disinterestedness is necessary on the part of any one who purposes to take up the science of abstract politics.   At any rate, if these reasons make us understand that sociology should make its appearance last among the fundamental sciences, none of them imply that it would not have arisen in its turn. On the contrary, beside “vital physics” and “inorganic physics,” “social physics” was one day to take its place. From 1824, Comte had a very clear idea of234 this. We do not see, he says, why the phenomena which the development of a social species presents should not have laws like the others, why these laws should not be capable of being discovered by observation, like those of the other phenomena, with this reservation only that the nature of this section of philosophy makes its study more difficult. “I will make it felt by the very fact that there are laws as determined for the development of the human species as for the falling of a stone.”233 Comte later on attenuated the rigidity of these expressions. He recognised that the social phenomena were of all others the most “modifiable.” But he none the less maintained that they were ruled by laws. II.   Sociology, an abstract and wholly theoretical science, only sets itself the task of discovering the laws of phenomena, without first taking into account any possible applications. I shall not have, says Comte, to concern myself directly with political anarchy.234 Here, more than anywhere else, science must be separated from the corresponding art. The same reasons which led to physiology being constituted apart from medicine, with which it had for so long been confused, also require that social science should be distinguished from politics, of which, up to the present time, it has only been a more or less empirical or arbitrary interpretation.   Comte who took such pains to define the physical fact, the chemical fact, the biological fact, has not given a definition of the sociological fact. The reasons for this are not difficult to see. In the first place, this fact defines itself so to speak, by elimination. As there are no phenomena accessible to us more complicated than those of the social life, all the phenomena which are not studied by the preceding sciences are of course235 the subject of sociology. Moreover, there might be a reason to seek for a definition of the sociological fact, if we started from the consideration of the individual to rise to that of society. But Comte’s conception is radically different. For him it is the individual who is an abstraction; and society is the true reality. He must not explain humanity by man, but on the contrary, man by humanity. From this moment, all the human phenomena properly so-called are ipso facto sociological. It is an essential characteristic of Comte’s system that man, considered individually, is not an object of science. The science of man belongs for one part to biology, for the other to sociology. To define the sociological fact amounts then to establishing the relations between biology and sociology.   We have already seen that these relations are extremely close. On the one hand, sociology could not be constituted so long as higher biology had not reached a certain degree of development. History has furnished us with a proof of this: the state of infancy of biology contributed largely to the failure of Montesquieu’s and Condorcet’s sociological attempts. But, on the other hand, the study of the intellectual and moral functions, that is to say, the highest part of biology, can only be made from the sociological point of view. Here we have a kind of mixed domain, which properly belongs neither to the one nor to the other of the sciences.   Could we not then consider sociology as a simple extension of biology, an extension which would be far more important in the case of the human species than in any of the others? Do we not do this implicitly when we attribute the study of the intellectual and moral functions to biology, since everything which bears the name of “moral science,” history, law, political economy, etc., finally rests upon these functions? What is the use of a new fundamental science for the study236 of phenomena which at bottom reduce themselves to biological phenomena?   Comte protested against this interpretation of his doctrine.235 According to him, sociology is no less irreducible to biology, than the latter is to chemistry. The sociological phenomena, independently of the more general laws which are common to them with the subjacent orders, have laws of their own which regulate them. If animal societies only existed as we see them to-day, it would perhaps not be impossible to consider sociology as an appendix of biology. But human society excludes any attempt of this kind. For it is social life which has made the extraordinary development of the intellectual and moral functions possible in man, and this development is the very definition of humanity. Now, the first consequence of this development is that biology properly so-called, no longer suffices for studying it. We need a new method in it, the method of historical observation. Already, were it for this reason alone, there can be no question of reducing sociology to biology.   In the second place, when we pass from the individual to the collective organism, “the continued expansion and the almost indefinite perpetuity” of the latter makes it almost impossible not to separate it from the former in a scientific study.236 Comte is not deceived by the analogy between the two kinds of organism. To speak accurately, sociology with him, hardly ever considers anything except a single organism. Let us leave aside the little that it says of animal societies. It represents the human race as constituting, in time and in space, “an immense and eternal social unity, whose various organs, individuals and nations, united by universal solidarity, each, according to a determined manner and degree concur in the evolution of Humanity.”   237   One of the ideas which Comte most admires in Condorcet, and which he regards as indispensable to social science, is that which makes a single being in process of evolution of the totality of the human species.237 Henceforth, the parallelism between this immense “social unity,” and the organisms studied by biology could not be a strict one. “The complex nature of the former,” says Comte himself, “deeply differs from the indivisible constitution of living beings.” We must then know how to restrain comparison wisely, “in order that it should not give rise to faulty approximations, instead of precious indications.” Comte has sometimes failed in carrying out this prudent precept, for instance, when in the social organism he looks for what is analogous to tissues, organs, and systems studied by the anatomists. But he has, none the less, traced very firmly the limits beyond which the use of analogy here becomes an abuse.   These limits are determined by the specific character of the social reality, which escapes the grasp of the biological method. For the principal phenomenon in sociology, the one which establishes most evidently its scientific originality, is the gradual and continuous influence of human generations upon one another. Now our intelligence cannot “guess the principal decisive phases of such a complex evolution without an historical analysis properly so-called.”238 Here is the final word: no history, no sociology. Comte had already written in 1822: To reduce sociology to biology is to annul the direct observation of the social past. Undoubtedly the reason for man’s superiority over the other animals lies in the relative perfection of his organisation. In this sense, social physics, that is to say, the study of collective development of the human species, is really a branch of physiology. In this sense, the history of civilisation is but the sequel and the indispensable complement of the natural history of man. But,238 important as it is to form a proper conception, and never to lose sight of this relation, yet it would be a mistake to conclude from it that no clear division should be established between social physics and physiology properly so-called. For, in the case of the human race, there is history which cannot be reached by a process of deduction.239 III.   Already, in biology the nature of the object had compelled scientific men to start from the consideration of the whole to reach that of the parts, to proceed from the complex to the simple. With still greater reason, the same inversion of method imposes itself in sociology. For, although the individual elements of society appear to be more separable than those of the living being, the social consensus is still closer than the vital consensus.240   The spirit of the sociological method will then be always to consider simultaneously the various social aspects, whether in statics, or in dynamics. Undoubtedly each of them can be the object of a special study, by the way of “preliminary elaboration.” But, as soon as the science is sufficiently advanced, the correlation of phenomena will serve as a guide for their analysis. Political economy has proved by facts that the isolated study of a series of social phenomena is condemned to remain irrational and barren. Those then who, in the system of social studies, wish to imitate “the methodical parcelling out, which belongs to the inorganic sciences,” misunderstand what the essential conditions of their subject require. Here the most general laws must be known first. It is from them that science must then descend to the more particular laws.   The more complex the phenomena, the more numerous are239 the processes of method at our disposal for studying them. This law of compensation is verified again in the present case. Sociology, over and above the processes made use of by the preceding sciences possesses some which are peculiarly its own. To put it more plainly, in its capacity of final science, the whole positive method belongs to it. As method is only learnt by practice, the sociologist will therefore have to be formed by a complete scientific education from mathematics, which will give him the feeling of positivity, to biology which will teach him the comparative method. The Cours de philosophie positive precisely retraces this methodical ascent, which leads the human mind, by successive degrees, up to social science. And, since the intellectual evolution of the individual reproduces that of the species, the sociologist will cover the same ground to reach the same end.   At any rate, if a mathematical education is indispensable so as to accustom him to the positive mode of thought, he will, however, acknowledge that social phenomena do not allow of the use of numbers or of mathematical analysis, nor more especially of the calculation of probabilities. Comte treats Laplace’s attempt upon this point as absurd, an attempt which has been taken up again by other mathematicians. He likes to quote it as a proof of the lack of the philosophical spirit among geometers. Indeed, according to him, to apply the calculation of probabilities to historical events, implies a failure to understand that these phenomena are subject to invariable laws like all other phenomena.   In default of the powerful instrument furnished by mathematics, sociology makes use of the methods employed in the physical and natural sciences. Of these observation is the first. Social phenomena seem easy to observe, because they are very common, and the observer takes part in them more or less. But, on the contrary, these two circumstances render sociological observation very difficult. We240 only observe well on condition that we place ourselves outside what we observe.241 Sociological facts ought then to appear objective to us, detached from us, independent of the state of our individual consciousness. Nothing is more difficult to realise. In order to obtain, and more especially to maintain, “such an inversion of the spontaneous point of view,” the mind must already have partly constructed what it wishes to see. Were it not already provided with a preliminary theory, for the most part the observer would not know what he must look for in the fact which is taking place under his eyes. It is therefore by the preceding facts that we learn to see the following ones. There lies “the immense difficulty” of sociology, in which we are thus obliged, in a certain measure, to determine simultaneously the facts and the laws. If we are not already possessed of the necessary speculative indications to grasp them, the facts remain barren and even unseen, although we are, so to speak, immersed in them.   Consequently, a social fact can have no scientific significance if it is not brought into relation with another fact. In an isolated condition, it remains in the state of a simple anecdote, capable at most of satisfying “idle curiosity,” but unfit for any rational use. An infinite number of facts may be useful to sociology, apparently very insignificant customs, all kinds of monuments, the analysis and the comparison of languages; but the mind must be provided for their observation with general points of view. Only on this condition will a mind, well prepared by rational education, be able to transform the actions which take place beneath its eyes into sociological indications, “according to the more or less direct points of contact, which he will be able to discern in these actions with the highest notions of science, in virtue of the connexion of the various social aspects.”   241   There can be no question of experimenting in sociology.242 Not that we cannot act upon the social phenomena: they are, on the contrary, the most modifiable of all. But an experiment properly so-called consists in comparing two cases which differ from each other by a certain definite circumstance, and by that one alone. We have no means of determining two cases of this kind in sociology. It is true that in the absence of direct experiments nature presents indirect ones. They are the pathological cases, unfortunately too frequent in the life of societies, the more or less serious perturbations which they undergo through accidental or passing causes. Such are the revolutionary periods which correspond to diseases in living bodies. If we properly extend Broussais’ principle to sociology, that is to say, if we admit that morbid phenomena are produced by the effect of the same laws as normal phenomena, then social pathology will in some measure replace experiments. It will be said that this study has been fruitless up to the present time. But the reason of this is, according to Comte, that direct or indirect experimenting ought, like simple observation, to be subject to rational conceptions. Both are only productive in a sociology already possessed of its essential laws.   The comparative method, so useful to the biologist, is also precious for the sociologist. It draws together the various states of human society which coexist on the different parts of the earth’s surface, and among peoples independent of one another. Undoubtedly, if the total development only is considered, the evolution of Humanity is one. It nevertheless remains true that very considerable and very varied populations have as yet only reached the more or less inferior degrees of this evolution. We can thus observe them simultaneously and compare their successive phases. From the Fuegians to the most civilised nations in Europe, we can imagine no242 “social shade” which is not at present realised on some portion of the globe. Frequently, within the same nation, the social condition of the various classes represents states of civilisation which are very far removed from one another. Paris to-day contains more or less faithful “survivors” of nearly all the anterior degrees of social evolution, especially from the intellectual point of view.243 This comparative process holds good for social statics as for social dynamics. Even in statics a comparison can be established between animal societies and human society.   However, this type of method is not devoid of inconvenience in sociology. It does not consider the necessary succession of the various phases in the social evolution: it seems on the contrary to consider them all as simultaneous. Consequently, it prevents us from seeing the filiation of social forms. It also runs the risk of falsifying the analysis of the cases which are observed, and of causing simple secondary factors to be taken for main causes. This is what happened to Montesquieu who compared indifferently the cities of antiquity, the France of the Middle Ages, the England of the XVIII. century, the republic of Venice, the government of Byzantium, the Empire of the Sultan, and that of the Shah of Persia.   So the comparative method is only an auxiliary process in sociology. Like observation and experiment, it has to be made subordinate to a rational conception of the evolution of humanity. The latter in turn depends upon the use of an original method of observation, belonging to social phenomena, and free from the dangers presented by the preceding ones. This specific sociological method, this “transcendent” process, by which the positive method is completed, is, says Comte, the historical method.244   243 IV.   Sociology is an abstract science: history, which is its essential method, cannot therefore be history merely considered as a narrative. There are two ways of conceiving history, the one abstract and the other concrete. The latter dominates in the historical works written up to the present time. Their end is to relate and to array in chronological order a certain sequence of events. Undoubtedly in the XVIII. century efforts were made to co-ordinate political phenomena and to determine their filiation. But for all that this kind of work has not ceased to be descriptive and literary. The other form of history, which does not exist up to the present, has for its end the research of the laws which regulate the social development of the human species.245   Difference of object leads to difference of method. If an historian proposes to himself to compose exact “annals,” to relate things as they took place, he will begin by the special history of the various peoples, which, in its turn, is founded upon the chronicles of the provinces and the towns. It will be necessary for him to investigate documents in detail, and to neglect no source: the work of combination will only come subsequently. But if our end is the abstract science of history, that is to say the linking together of social phenomena, quite a different course will have to be followed. Indeed all the classes of these phenomena are simultaneously developed, and under the mutual influence of one another. We cannot explain the line of advance followed by anyone among them, without having first conceived in a general way “the progression of the whole.” Before all things then we must set ourselves to conceive the development of the human species in its widest generality, that is to say, to observe and to link together among themselves the most important steps towards progress which it has suc244cessively taken in the various fundamental directions. Then we shall subdivide the periods and the classes of the phenomena to be observed.246   These “various fundamental directions” correspond to what Comte called later the “social series.” By this he indicates the groups of social phenomena arranged for a scientific study. Once these groups are formed, then, according to the totality of historical facts, the sociologist seeks to determine the continuous growth of each, physical, moral, intellectual or political disposition or faculty, combined with the indefinite decrease of the opposite disposition or faculty: for instance, the tendency of human society to pass from the warlike form to the industrial form, from revealed religion to demonstrated religion, etc. From this will be drawn the scientific forecast of the triumph of the one and the fall of the other, provided that this conclusion is also in conformity with the general laws of the evolution of Humanity.   Such a forecast could never be founded upon the knowledge of the present alone. For the present exposes us to the danger of confusing the principal with the secondary facts, of “placing noisy passing demonstrations above deep-seated tendencies,” and of regarding institutions or doctrines as growing which are really on the decline. Our statesmen scarcely look back beyond the XVIII. century, our philosophers beyond the XVI. This is too little. It does not even suffice to make us understand the French revolution. The study of the “historical series” alone allows the understanding of the present and the prevision of the future. The sociologist will even exercise himself in predicting the past, that is to say, in acquiring a rational knowledge of it, and in deducing each historical situation from the whole of its antecedents. He will thus become familiar with the spirit of the historical method.   However, if this abstract historical method were used by245 the sociologist to the exclusion of every other, he would sometimes come to a wrong conclusion, and take the continuous decrease in a natural faculty for a tendency to total extinction. For instance, as civilisation becomes more refined, man eats less than formerly. Nobody concludes from this that he tends not to eat at all. But the absurdity which is palpable here, might, in other cases pass unperceived. That is why the historical method in sociology requires to be controlled by the positive theory of human nature. All the inductions which might contradict this theory are to be rejected. Indeed, the whole social evolution is at bottom but a simple development of humanity, without the creation of new faculties. The germ, at any rate, of all the dispositions or effective faculties which sociological observation, (and in particular, history), may make known, must then be found in the primordial type which biology has constructed beforehand for sociology. Accordance between the conclusions of historical analysis and the preliminary notions of the biological theory is the indispensable guarantee of sociological demonstrations.247 V.   Thus conceived the historical method rests upon the postulate given by Comte, as we have seen, as a basis to his sociology. This postulate is thus enunciated: The nature of man evolves without being transformed. The various physical, moral and intellectual faculties, must be found the same at all the degrees of historical evolution, and always similarly co-ordinated among themselves. The development which they receive in the social state can never change their nature, nor consequently destroy or create any one of them, nor even intervene in the order of their importance.   246   In a word, the chief regulator of sociology is the science of human nature. It can even be said, without forcing the meaning of Comte’s thought, that sociology is really a psychology:248 not indeed, it is true, a psychology founded upon the introspective analysis of the individual subject, but a psychology whose object is the analysis by history, of the universal subject, that is to say, of Humanity.   Comte endeavours to bring the complexity and the extreme variety of social phenomena into an intelligible unity. This complexity is such that we could not determine the laws by starting from the observation of the simplest phenomena to reach the more complex ones afterwards. Moreover, these facts only possess sociological significance if the observer is already provided with a general theory before he ascertains them. But, on the other hand, history cannot be deduced. Given an already positive knowledge of human nature and of the “milieu” in which it evolves, we could not say a priori how it will evolve. History must then teach us how, as a matter of fact, social life has developed Humanity. Nevertheless, once this concession has been made to observation the method becomes again deductive. Since sociology is a science it ought, like the other sciences, to be able to substitute rational prevision to the empirical establishment of facts.   To complete the characterising of this final science, it must be at once positive, like the subjacent fundamental sciences, and universal like philosophy, which alone up to the present time has looked at things from “the point of view of the whole.” Henceforth these two conditions are fulfilled. In the first place, the positivity of sociology cannot be doubted. In it social facts are conceived as subject to laws, and Comte abstains from any research as to their mode of production. Then, sociology, in spite of the extreme difficulties of its object, has assumed the deductive form, and has brought247 secondary laws under more general laws. Comte is even convinced that his sociology comes nearer to the perfect scientific form than physics or chemistry. By his discovery of the great dynamic law of the three states, has he not given it a unity which is to be found as complete nowhere else but in astronomy? But, at the same time, it is truly universal, since it is a philosophy of history, or, in other words, the science of humanity considered in its evolution. As this science presupposes biology, and as biology in turn presupposes the science of the “milieu” in which living beings are immersed, sociology becomes at once the summary and the crown of the sciences which precede it.   Thus in replacing man in Humanity, and Humanity in the system of its conditions of existence, Comte constructs a final science which is at the same time the supreme science, the only science, that is to say, philosophy. “If the laws of sociology could be sufficiently known to us, they alone would suffice to replace all the others, save the difficulties of deduction.”249 The science of Humanity is the centre around which the others range themselves in order.   Already with Descartes, the anthropological character of philosophy was strongly marked. After him, philosophical speculation took man for its centre more and more. This tendency also predominates in Comte’s doctrine. But in it it assumes a social character. Here the “universal subject” is no longer the intellectual consciousness of Kant, or the absolute “ego” of Fichte; it is Humanity evolving in time, whose unity is displayed through the succession of generations connected in strict solidarity with each other. Henceforth the philosophical problems, no longer present themselves from the point of view of man conceived in the abstract or in himself apart from time. The consideration of history necessarily intervenes. Problems are formulated in social terms. There248 lies the deep significance of the doctrine systematised by Comte.