before a subcommittee, April 21-24, 1920; statement of W. A. Blackwood; decisions; digest of cases deported on U.S. transport "Buford." Apply to Congressman. Pp. 158. U.S. House. Naturalization and Citizen ship: Report. Apply to Congressman. Pp. 4. Percentage Plans for Restriction of Immigration: Hearings, June 12-14, 18-20, and Sept. 25, 1919. Apply to Congressman. Pp. 296. U.S. House. Com. on Rules. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer on Charges Made Against Department of Justice by Louis F. Post and Others: Hearings, June 1-2, 1920. Apply to Congressman. Pp. 209. U.S. Library of Congress. List of References on Intermarriage of Races with Special Emphasis on Immigrants. Washington. Pp. 4 (Mim.). List of References on Labor Questions in the United States and Foreign Countries, 1700 to 1850. Pp. 10. (Typew.) $0.60. U.S. Library of Congress. List of References on Married Women in Industry Exclusive of Home Work. To be obtained only through P. A. I. S. Pp. 11. (Typew.) $0.65. List of References on the Origin and Development of the Present Unrest. Pp. 3. (Typew.) $0.25. U.S. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations. Russian Propaganda: Report. Apply to Congressman. Pp. 15. U.S. Women's Bureau. Hours and Conditions of Work for Women in Industry in Virginia. Washington: Govt. Ptg. Office. Pp. 32. Voluntary Parenthood League. Some Comment on the Famous "ror Neediest Cases" of the New York Times. New York: The League. Pp. 14. Wallin, J. E. Problem of Mental Subnormality. St. Louis, Mo.: Central Council of Social Agencies. Pp. 8. Whitley, J. R. Works Committee and Industrial Councils: Their Beginnings and Possibilities. Manchester: College of Technology. Pp. 25. I. ROBERT E. PARK SOCIOLOGY AND "SCIENTIFIC" HISTORY Sociology first gained recognition as an independent science with the publication, between 1830 and 1842, of Auguste Comte's Cours de Philosophie Positive. Comte did not, to be sure, create sociology. He did give it a name, a program, and a place among the sciences. Comte's program for the new science proposed an extension to politics and to history of the positive methods of the natural sciences. Its practical aim was to establish government on the secure foundation of an exact science and give to the predictions of history something of the precision of mathematical formulae. We have to contemplate social phenomena as susceptible of prevision, like all other classes, within the limits of exactness compatible with their higher complexity. Comprehending the three characteristics of political science which we have been examining, prevision of social phenomena supposes, first, that we have abandoned the region of metaphysical idealities, to assume the ground of observed realities by a systematic subordination of imagination to observation; secondly, that political conceptions have ceased to be absolute, and have become relative to the variable state of civilization, so that theories, following the natural course of facts, may admit of our foreseeing them; and, thirdly, that permanent political action is limited by determinate laws, since, if social events were always exposed to disturbance by the accidental intervention of the legislator, human or divine, no scientific prevision of them would be possible. Thus, we may concentrate the conditions of the spirit of positive social philosophy on this one great attribute of scientific prevision.1 Comte proposed, in short, to make government a technical science and politics a profession. He looked forward to a time when legislation, based on a scientific study of human nature, would assume the character of natural law. The earlier and more elementary sciences, particularly physics and chemistry, had given man control over external nature; the last science, sociology, was to give man control over himself. Men were long in learning that Man's power of modifying phenomena can result only from his knowledge of their natural laws; and in the infancy of each science, they believed themselves able to exert an unbounded influence over the phenomena of that science. . . . . Social phenomena are, of course, from their extreme complexity, the last to be freed from this pretension: but it is therefore only the more necessary to remember that the pretension existed with regard to all the rest, in their earliest stage, and to anticipate therefore that social science will, in its turn, be emancipated from the delusion. . . . . It [the existing social science] represents the social action of Man to be indefinite and arbitrary, as was once thought in regard to biological, chemical, physical, and even astronomical phenomena, in the earlier stages of their respective sciences. . . . . . . The human race finds itself delivered over, without logical protection, to the ill-regulated experimentation of the various political schools, each one of which strives to set up, for all future time, its own immutable type of government. We have seen what are the chaotic results of such a strife; and we shall find that there is no chance of order and agreement but in subjecting social phenomena, like all others, to invariable natural laws, which shall, as a whole, prescribe for each period, with entire certainty, the limits and character of political action: in other words, introducing into the study of social phenomena the same positive spirit which has regenerated every other branch of human speculation. In the present anarchy of political opinion and parties, changes in the existing social order inevitably assume, he urged, the character, at the best, of a mere groping empiricism; at the worst, of a social convulsion like that of the French Revolution. Under the 1 Harriet Martineau, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, freely translated and condensed (London, 1893), II, 61. 2 Harriet Martineau, op. cit., II, 59–60. |