gious or political liberty, and its consequence is that exceeding heterogeneity of the demotic composition which is seen, for example, in the population of the United States.

There are, thirdly, the processes of internal equilibration. First among these is the differentiation of the mind of the population, consequent upon some degree of unlikeness and inequality in the responses of differing individuals to the common stimuli to which all are subjected. This is followed by the segregation of resembling products into types and classes. Secondly, there is an evolution of the consciousness of kind, with increasing attention to means of communication and association. Thirdly, there is a struggle between strong individuals and weak, between leaders and followers, between strong and weak classes. This equilibration may take one of three possible forms: (1) the subjugation and perhaps the enslavement of the weak by the strong; (2) economic exploitation; (3) the uplifting of the weak by the strong through education, justice, and economic aid. The moral advance of society is a progress from equilibration through subjugation and exploitation to equilibration through uplifting, and it depends upon the broadening and deepening of the consciousness of kind.

A fourth phase of internal equilibration appears in the struggle among differing groups of the like-minded in the community. Some elements of the population are sympathetically emotional, or are alike in beliefs or dogmas. Others are alike intellectually, rationally they attain agreement through deliberation. In every community the reasoning and the unreasoning elements are in perpetual conflict.

To the extent that the community is controlled by its deliberative element, it exhibits a policy-a more or less consistent attempt consciously made to control its destiny. In the history of human society there have been three great groups of policies, namely: (1) policies of unification — attempts to make all members of the community alike in type, in belief, and in conduct; (2) policies of liberty — attempts to give wide scope to individual initiative; (3) policies of equality—attempts to prevent the disintegration of society through an excess of individual

liberty. The struggle of conflicting interests in the community, which these three modes of policy represent, is yet another form of internal equilibration.

To the extent that a policy of equality is adopted, the community is democratic. Political equality, equality before the law, and some approach toward equality of economic opportunity, are the essential elements of democracy. No sooner is democracy evolved than we see a struggle between the forces that make for absolutist, and those that make for liberal, democracy. Either the majority is permitted to rule at will, or it is compelled to leave inviolate certain rights of the minority and of individuals.

In

The outcome of all equilibration, external and internal, is a certain relation of the individual to the social organization. In low types of society the individual literally belongs to the various social groups in which his lot is cast. He belongs to them for life. To leave them is to become an outcast. He may not leave his clan, his guild, his caste, his church, or his state. superior types of society we discover a high degree of individual mobility combined with a marvelous power to concentrate enormous numbers of individuals in moments of emergency, upon any work needing to be done. The individual may go freely from state to state, from parish to parish, in search of his best economic opportunity. He may sever connection with his church to join another, or none at all. He may be a director today in a dozen corporations, and tomorrow in a dozen different ones. The goal of social evolution is a complex, flexible, liberal organization, permitting the utmost liberty and mobility to the individual, without impairing the efficiency of organization as a whole.

On the methods of sociology remark at this time must necessarily be brief.

Dealing as we do with highly concrete materials, we place our main reliance upon systematic induction. The experimental method of induction, however, is of little avail in the scientific study of society. Although social experimenting is at all times

going on, it is difficult to isolate causes or to control conditions with scientific thoroughness. Observation, therefore, and critically established records of observations made in bygone days, must be our main dependence, so far as the accumulation of data is concerned.

Yet in a field so vast, observation itself would be a fruitless toil if it were not directed by scientific rules. Canons of guidance we find in the so-called comparative and historical methods. Selecting any social fact, or correlation of facts, observed in any given society, we systematically search for a corresponding fact or correlation in all contemporaneous societies, animal and human, ethnic and civil. This search has one clearly defined object, namely: to determine whether the observed fact is a universal, and therefore an essential, an elementary phenomenon of society, and, if it is not universal, to ascertain just how wide its distribution is. By such research we discover those resemblances and differences in social phenomena that are the bases of scientific classification.

Having in this manner arrived at a scheme of classification, we use it in subsequent observation precisely as the chemist or the botanist uses the classifications that have been established in his science. We systematically look for the facts and the correlations that the classification leads us to anticipate.

In like manner, following the historical method, we search for a given social fact at each stage in the historical evolution of a given society, and thereby determine what social phenomena are continuous.

A complete scientific theory of natural causation is established only when our knowledge becomes quantitatively precise. Often the law that we seek to formulate eludes us until the correlations of phenomena have been determined with mathematical exactness. Sociology has unjustly been reproached for neglecting that attention to precision which is the boast of other sciences. The indictment of vagueness may be a true bill against individual sociologists. It is demonstrably not a true bill against sociology. It is to the scientific students of sociology that the world owes the discovery and development of an inestimably valuable

form of the comparative and historical methods, namely, the statistical method. Every inductive science today is adopting this method. Physics, chemistry, astronomy, and geology, would be helpless without it. The biologists have acknowledged their dependence upon it by the establishment of a statistical journal, Biometrica. It is not too much to claim that the possibilities of this now indispensable method of all the sciences were first demonstrated in the epoch-making social studies of Jacques Quetelet, and that its employment in sociology has been out of all proportion to its employment elsewhere. As developed in recent years by the Dane, Westergaard; by Germans like Steinhauser, Lexis, and Meyer; by Italians, like Bodio; by Frenchmen, like Lavasseur and Dumont; by Englishmen, like Charles Booth, E. B. Tylor, Galton, Bowley, and Karl Pearson; by Americans, like Weber, Norton, Mayo-Smith, Cattell, Thorndike, and Boas, it has become, and will continue to be, the chiefly important method of sociology; and assuredly, in the course of time, it will bring our knowledge of society up to standards of thoroughness and precision comparable to the results attained by any natural science.

FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY,

New York City.

THE PROBLEMS OF SOCIOLOGY.1

It seems to me necessary to introduce the discussion of my theme by explaining what I understand by sociology, what its tasks are, and what the methods are which seem to me appropriate to this science.

By sociology I understand the science of the reciprocal relationships of human beings; its task is to discover the fundamental tendencies of social evolution and the conditions of the general welfare of human beings.

In accordance with this conception sociology should lead to promotion of the common weal on a level above that of naïve empiricism; viz., on that of conscious and purposeful action. Sociology should do for social weal what medicine, for example, tries to do for bodily welfare. A scientifically sanctioned practice should take the place of the prevailing quackery in treatment of the social body. In earlier times the various creeds and churches were zealous in trying to regulate social relationships. More recently this has been the function of political authorities. Because, however, neither of these agencies has in practice very often secured the common weal, it came to pass that the elucidation of this question fell largely into the hands of speculative theorists. Plato and Aristotle were sociologists whose dialectical system maintained influence down to the time of Hegel. Because this thought, however, acquired little influence over the reciprocal relationships of men, there was at last a turning of research toward social phenomena in order to derive theorems from experience in this field. As a matter of course, it was necessary that the total phenomena of human relationships should first of all be separated into special departments of research. Certain such special departments had already been for a long time the subject-matter of investigation. This is true of history considered as chronological exhibition of social evolution, with 1 1A paper presented in Department 16, Section b, “Social Structure," of the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Science. Translated by ALBION W. SMALL.