Sociology based upon ethnography / by Charles Letourneau ; translated by Henry M. Trollope.

  • Charles Letourneau
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sociology based upon ethnography / by Charles Letourneau ; translated by Henry M. Trollope. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    which will agree with theii preconceived opinions. Vico, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, are the most illustrious representatives of this school, and all these men possessed minds of the highest order. But have all these thinkers succeeded in founding Sociology ? —for this hybrid word was first brought into fashion by Comte. We can hardly think so, unless Ave wish to close our eyes very determinedly. We have the Avord Avithout the thing, and it cannot be otherAvise. The commencement of an}'’ science, hoAvever simple, is ahvays a collective Avork. It requires the constant labour of many patient Avorkmen, succeeding each other, each benefiting from the toil of his predecessor, and through a long series of generations. Isolated minds, let them be ever so poAverful, can- not do more than promulgate speculative questions that may be more or less ingenious. Again, the rise of any science is all the more laborious in pro- portion as it is vast; and Avhat can be more complex than Social Science 1 Modern investigations have taught us the fundamental truth that everything in the universe must be governed by laAvs. We have therefore our sociological laAA's. But it becomes more difficult to discover a laAv in proportion as the phenomena Avhich it governs are multiple, are variable and intricate; and social facts are numberless, their intricacy and their variability are extreme. By dint of observations and experiments made and continued during historic periods Ave have succeeded in formulating a feAv astronomical laAvs ; and yet Ave are told that the isolated meditations of some feAv systematic minds can give us a ready-made scientific Sociology ' Anyone Avho likes to believe in this illusion is of course free to do so.
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