Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

  • Sidney Webb
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    28/284 (page 16)
    . . . The type must be connected by many affinities with most of the others of its group; it must be near the centre of the crowd, and not one of its stragglers.” There is, indeed, a real sense in which science is one, with the single task of knowing a universe in which the provinces and frontiers drawn by the human mind have no objective existence. The divi¬ sion of our studies into separate sciences is justified only by its convenience in concentrating our atten¬ tion upon particular ranges of phenomena, and by its utility in helping us to form generalisations that we find to be valid descriptions of these phenomena. The very continuance of social science or sociology as a separate category of study—as, indeed, that of chemistry—will depend on the world’s experience of the practical utility of such a parcelling out of knowledge at the particular stage of the world’s history that we may have attained. Moreover, the method of science—the intellectual procedure by means of which we increase our know¬ ledge of the universe-may rightly be regarded as common to all the sciences, however they may be parcelled out and classified. “Scientific thinking, in¬ deed,” to quote L. T. Hobhouse, “is not distinguished from common sense by any peculiar assumptions, by any limitations of method, or by any restriction to one field of experience rather than another. It is dis¬ tinguished, first, by its motive. It aims at the dis¬ covery of truth and at no other result. It is detached from emotional, personal, or practical objects. It is