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Updated: September 21, 2025
We shall realise that all this talk of the organisation of sociology, as though presently the sociologist would be going about the world with the authority of a sanitary engineer, is and will remain nonsense.
It deals with the organization and development of government and embraces the departments of national and international law, but the governmental function of the social group is but one of the divisions of the interests that absorb the sociologist. He uses the data and conclusions of the political scientists, but in a more general way. It is the same with the sociologist and history.
It is therefore not too much for the sociologist to say, agreeing with Thomas Davidson, that education is the last and highest method of social evolution. The lowest method of evolution was by selection, and that, as we have already emphasized, cannot be neglected.
Now all beings, in a greater or less degree according to their perfection or imperfection, feel this triple condition of being able, knowing, and wishing. This is why all creative things gravitate to God and desire to return to Him as to their origin, and as the perfection of what they are: the universe has nostalgia for God. Campanella was also, as we should say nowadays, a sociologist.
With Bachofen, he argued that this matriarchal period must have been characterized by promiscuous relations of the sexes. In 1877 Mr. Lewis H. Morgan, an American ethnologist and sociologist, put forth again, independently, practically the same theory, basing it upon an extensive study of the North American Indian tribes.
So it is for our everyday customs and institutions, and so for living languages; our own, perhaps, most of all. These, of course, are facts made familiar by investigators of all orders, from the scholar and antiquary of old, the historian and philologist of yesterday, to the geographer or the sociologist of our own time: witness Mr. Spencer's masterly treatment of their main results.
They are found not only in the ranks of the rich and the well-to-do, but in the ranks of labor as well. They have but one point of basic difference from their enslaved sisters they are not burdened with the rearing of large families. We have no need to call upon the historian, the sociologist nor the statistician for our knowledge of this situation.
History supplies much of the data of the sociologist from the records of the past. It deals with social life in the concrete, and historical interpretation is essential to an understanding of social phenomena, but sociology takes the past with the present, analyzes both, and generalizes from both as to the laws of the social process. Pedagogy deals with the history and principles of education.
The metaphysician finds the reasonings of the "First Principles" rather loose and inconclusive; the biologist pays little heed to the "Principles of Biology"; the sociologist finds Spencer not particularly accurate or careful in the field of his predilection.
We hope, of course, that some of our pupils may become inventors, but this will be impossible unless they possess imagination. A sociologist states the case in this fashion: "Wealth, the transient, is material; achievement, the enduring, is immaterial. The products of achievement are not material things at all. They are not ends, but means.
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