Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/552

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532 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

have experienced severe rebuffs from the latter. While consistently validating the above historico-scientific conception as to the " denial on the part of the psychical sciences " of an independent sociology, Ratzenhofer flings the gauntlet in the face when he remarks (p. 5): "While philosophy has in the main hitherto recognized only two principal territories, psychical life and the phenomena of the material world, there has remained a third territory, by it too little considered, which has a psychical life, as well as, also, the phenomena of the mate- rial world — the societary life. In the fathoming of the same phi- losophy must find its reawakening. The societary life points to the innermost instincts of man as the explanation of the position of every individual as distinct from the generality. It opens for us the outlook upon a gigantic field of science which we, in the dimness of our dis- cernment, hitherto have regarded as belonging partly to the science of individual consciousness and partly to the sciences of the material world. It devolves upon sociology as a part of philosophy, of course with psychology, to disclose the fundamental principles of this domain of science and to command it. As the latter (psychology), upon the basis of physiology, investigates the inner nature of man, the former (sociology), upon the basis of history and ethnology, discloses the external relationships of man. But both disclose the physical life of men only in conjunction with natural science, whereby the comprehen- sion of all knowledge appertaining thereto devolves upon sociology. A philosophy without sociology is like a psychology without physi- ology : it is a speculation given over to subjective fallacies. Along with cosmological, psychological, and ontological problems belong also the sociological ; for our thinking is not fully circumscribed until to the ideas of the world, I, and eternity are added those of human reciprocal relationships. Because this problem has not hitherto been fundamentally considered, the moral ideal of philosophers (humanity, virtue, happiness, etc.) has remained a phantasma; we comprehend it only when we fully understand psychological knowledge concerning the individual will through sociological knowledge concerning the social will. Sociology is the philosophical basis for the sciences of human relationships and their most essential manifestation, politics. What physics and chemistry are to natural science, such is sociology to the sciences concerned with human relationships ; what mechanics is to material forces, such is a doctrine of politics to social forces. Soci- ology purposes, therefore, not the concrete investigation of single social phenomena — that is the task of the special sciences related to