footing on the more extended and far-reaching relationships, and thus approach formulations of more general import, reaching into far extensions of time and space and into correlations of vast complexity. Or, perhaps better said, he must be content at first with only vague and verbal descriptive generalizations covering phenomena of vast extent and great complexity, while he seeks successfully for more definite and quantitative laws covering the simpler phenomena nearer at hand. He can approach accurate laws for such general processes as evolution and progress only through the achievement of a vast number of constituent quantitative generalizations. It is not possible to begin with the most general laws covering the most complex and extended phenomena and then work back by deduction to the detailed specific constituent laws. This is a favorite method of the theological and metaphysical thinkers, but it is impracticable as a general method of procedure for science.

Each science begins as a collection of hitherto unorganized data and formulas, or as a transposition and analogical transformation of data and formulas which were organized about some other concept or problem. These data and formulas become integrated about some new and persistent problem; and this systematic integration constitutes the core of the new science, to which new data and formulas are constantly being attracted and assimilated. Thus new sciences split off around new problems and complexes of problems. Some of their data they borrow from other sciences, other data they produce by means of their own investigations. In the early stages of their history they borrow more than they produce for themselves, and consequently they are likely to be characterized as hodgepodges rather than as sciences. When they have proved their mettle by making a considerable showing of original research, they are admitted into the sisterhood of sciences. Sociology is a good example of this process of growth toward the status of a recognized and respectable science. The older sciences have, however, gone through similar stages of development. We still recognize a distinction between the exact and the non-exact sciences, or between the aristocratic ones which work primarily with mathematical and laboratory processes and the

newcomers which still work largely or mainly with the logic of general observation in the place of laboratories, and are content with verbally descriptive formulations of principles.

But even the so-called exact sciences are not completed sciences. Rather they are like our stellar universe, with some small parts quite well known, but with other vast regions still largely unexplored and certainly not mathematically and quantitatively described or measured. Every textbook of physics is divided into books or chapters or some other major divisions, which means for the most part that the physicist is still dealing with incompletely connected regions of knowledge. For a long time the physicists treated light, heat, electricity, and sound as separate spheres of investigation. Only recently have they made marked headway toward reducing these phenomena to the same common denominator, and they are now busy working out laws and hypotheses which will reach beyond the more concrete and limited generalizations within each separate sphere of investigation and give perspective to what were formerly distinct groups of phenomena or separate spheres in physics. Physical science begins to loom before us as a unity, as one science instead of several related sciences. The scientist is learning to look across the border lands and the dark nebulous fields in between and to think and view the whole universe of his knowledge of phenomena together or as a whole. This he does through the statement of ever more generalized principles and laws, to which he never could have attained without the preliminary formulation of the more specialized laws and principles of more limited extent.8

Yet the unity which is coming into physics and chemistry through the agency of ever expanding generalization has not yet broken down the barriers between the great general sciences, although it has done something in this direction. Physics and chemistry now have much in common, although they began as wholly separate sciences centering around very distinct sets of problems.

* An excellent example of this integration of conflicting or apparently independent fields of knowledge and of principles by means of the formulation of more general and inclusive principles may be seen in the principle of relativity of Einstein, by means of which the conflict between the Newtonian mechanics and the laws of electrodynamics was resolved on a higher and more inclusive plane of generalization.

The intimacy of this relationship or overlapping will undoubtedly increase rather than diminish or stand still. Furthermore, physics and mathematics have all but merged, and in this merger astronomy, which once enjoyed the distinction of being classed as an independent general science, has been practically swallowed up. The isolation of biology and psychology and sociology also is disappearing. Biology constantly includes more and more of biophysics and biochemistry, while psychology is becoming distinctly biological and behavioristic in character. Sociology itself has been defined as the biology and the psychology of the collective life." The meaning of all this is that the discreteness of the sciences and of scientific generalization and laws is disappearing and in its place is coming unity of viewpoint and therefore inclusiveness of generalizations on a higher plane. This unity and inclusiveness can come only through the ever broadening scope of generalizations. Thus scientific law grows to cover an ever widening portion of the universe physically and mentally, and even finally to unite these two erstwhile separate spheres. At the same time and as a consequence, man is able to see his world increasingly as a whole and to control it with greater definiteness and more completely for his ends, or at least to adjust himself to it where he cannot dominate it.

This process of ever widening integration which we see going on in the abstract fields of science through the formulation of increasingly comprehensive formulas and laws we find taking place also on the applied side in relation to social progress. The fact that we cannot visualize the whole perspective of progress and formulate final objectives and look our behavior as a whole into perspective with these formulations does not disqualify us for the formulation of some tentative norms of progress, and for the application of these norms to concrete circumstances or problems in the light of our projected ends. As the sphere of scientific generalization expands, so does our concept of the nature and conditions of progress itself. We can formulate objectives in progress only in so far as we can command scientific data and generalizations which broaden and intensify our view of the world or universe in which progress must be achieved, if it is to be achieved at all. Our con

'C. A. Ellwood, Sociology and Modern Social Problems, chap. i.

ceptions of what constitutes progress expand with the expansion and integration of science, and our power to control our world for progressive ends grows with our increasing mastery of science.

But we are told that there are not and in the nature of things never can be any permanent and constant objectives in social progress. Such, of course, is the case, but this is quite different from saying that there is no progress. It is equally true that there are no permanent and constant or final and absolute facts and principles and ends in any science. All scientific laws merely generalize abstract norms for measurement of specific variations out of the concrete instances which exist within our view. Not only are the human social and historical facts or events separate individual facts. All the facts of nature are likewise individual and distinctive facts. That is a necessary correlate and consequence of the fact of a dynamic world; only in a static world could there be repetition or uniformity. Laws are not statements of uniformity," as staticminded people have said, but they are man-made static views of aggregates of changing and individual phenomena. And the laws retain their form as long as they constitute usable norms which serve as bases of correlation of variant events and phenomena as they must change in form and content when the phenomena which world through understanding it or in manipulating it. They change, first by evolving or in being formulated, and ultimately they must change in form and content when the phenomena which they generalize have changed. Those that are most general, that relate to complex and fluid phenomena, such as the social, must change more rapidly. Those which have to do with the slowly evolving physical world will change as only the physical world or universe itself changes, which is very slowly. Consequently, these laws appear to be fixed and unchanging, absolute, because the conditions basic to many of them outlast the history of man himself.11 But who can doubt that there have been many changes in the climate of the earth and that if there had been minds to formulate 19 C. A. Ellwood, Sociology in Its Psychological Aspects, pp. 73-80, appears to think otherwise, as do many other writers.

"But the conflict of laws which produced Einstein's principle of relativity as a means of correlation shows clearly that the truth of any law, even in physics, is only relative to the time and conditions for which it is formulated.

laws of climate in past geologic ages these climatic laws also would have changed or have merged in more inclusive principles which arise as the result of the broader perspective attained by students of geologic time? Laws of population, of production, and of the market also must undergo modification with changes in the relationship of man to climate and soil, and as changes in the density of population and in fauna and flora are brought about by changes in climate, the production of inventions, and the like. If we are able to merge these changing laws into ever more general and inclusive, and therefore less immediately variable, principles or formulas, this fact but illustrates the method of the growth of science and makes clear one of the methods of change.

The statements of the objectives and of the criteria of social progress are subject to the same principles of modification and development as the principles of science in general. There is a constant growth in the content of the theory of social progress. Objectives are becoming increasingly more ultimate and general, on the one hand, and also more specific and definite, on the other. The criteria of progress are being stated and defined just as fast as scientific investigation and generalization give us the data with which to formulate such criteria and objectives. Old criteria change, are modified by the utilization of new knowledge, on the one hand, and by the development of new adjustments to changing conditions of existence, on the other. Some of the conditions of existence change slowly and some rapidly, just as the phenomena which are generalized into the perspective of scientific laws change slowly or rapidly according to the types of phenomena which they are. Some criteria we discard altogether. Our objectives we revise constantly, but on the whole we approach to a better understanding of the criteria and objectives which will function over an increasingly longer period of time and for ever larger numbers of people. Out of this flux and modification there grows an increasing unity of understanding and purpose, which itself must undergo change, revision, integration, like the sciences upon which it is dependent. Through this science-content we also learn the limitations to progress, as well as how to formulate its objectives and to control its realization. We may even learn that progress is not