THE CLAIMS OF SOCIOLOGY 257
Historians, political economists, and politcial scientists are well aware of the methodological problems raised by "the natural-science view of human society," and are working on them. The presidential address of Professor George Burton Adams at the last annual meeting of the American Historical Association, dealt with this subject from the historian's stand- point.^^ Professor Small himself has given citations, illustrat- ing the activity of the political economists in dealing with such problems. As regards the attitude of political science, I submit the following extracts from a paper of my own, read before the American Political Science Association at its annual meeting in 1905 :
As at present constituted, political science is incapable of being corre- lated with statesmanship as the source of the principles that guide and support the art of government. To occupy such a relation it must take for its subject-matter the nature of public authority whatever forms it may assume, elucidating their genetic order and formulating the laws of their growth and development. It must detach its abstract terms from the his- torical accidents of their origin and provide itself with a systematic term- inology of definite significance. In fine, political science cannot be held to be constituted as such until it is put upon an objective basis. It must experience the reconstruction which the general body of science has undergone at the hands of inductive philosophy, and take its place in orderly connection with natural history.
That politics have a natural history is implied by the accepted theory of the descent of man, but while the philosophical interest of the principle may be admitted it may be questioned whether it is practically possible to provide a scheme of classification for political science in accord with it. However great the difficulty may be, there seems to be no escape from it if political science is ever to be placed upon an objective basis, for the cardinal principle of that theory is that the development of humanity is but one phase of a process of development governed throughout by the same general laws, and hence it is impossible that we can understand any part of this process except in orderly relation to the whole process.
As to the possibility of defining the scope of political science in accord with this principle, it may be remarked that the idea has already been distinctly expressed. A theory which regards the state not only as perman- ent and universal in the abstract but develops the idea with logical con- sistency in its historical application, was propounded in 1885 by Sir John Robert Seeley in lectures at Cambridge University. They were edited by
^American Historical Review, Vol. XIV, No. 2, January, 1909.
