SOCIOLOGY AND THE STATE 677
the great law of Social Control, and forces home to us anew the truth that sociology has to do with energy as certainly as astron- omy, physics, chemistry, and biology. But this is only one side of the subject. It relates to the static aspect only. The dynamic aspect is even more striking and more important. To treat of that here would be but to repeat what I have been saying for thirty years.
II
On several occasions I have attempted to show that the tend- ency of sociology has been to seek to narrow it down to some one principle supposed to be adequate to embrace the whole field, and that there are many such principles, each of which is so regarded by some one writer or some school of writers. When I made my principal contribution® to this aspect of the subject in 1902, and discussed twelve such principles, all of which belong to sociology and constitute important factors in the completed science, no one had distinctly claimed that political science was the great comprehensive discipline, and that the whole field now usually embraced by the science of sociology falls under the single conception of the state. Such a claim has recently been made, and to it a moment's attention may now be given.
There is a doctrine usually ascribed to Comte and defended by a considerable number of sociologists, which has been some- times called "objectification." Its chief form consists in declaring that society is the only reality, and that the individual is an abstraction. Comte is supposed to have said this but he only said that the man is an abstraction, and that there is nothing real but humanity,^ The doctrine is metaphysical enough in any form, and it is such doctrines as this that have done most to discredit sociology in the eyes of scientific men. They judge all sociol- ogists by the few who maintain such views, and the open enemies of the science have made the most of this.
• "Contemporary Sociology," Amer. Journ. Sociol., Vol. VII, pp. 475-500, 629-58, 749-62 ; Soziologie von Heute (Uebersetzung aus dem Englischen) Inns- bruck, 1904.
- Philosophie positive, 3d edition, 1869, Vol. VI, p. 590.
