$86 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
in the formulation of condition, and the greater or less complexity or variation of the individual case from the rule is no impeach- ment of their theoretical validity.
Nor can it be so serious a matter for historiography that historical laws are derived by inference from the effect to the cause. The same thing would be primarily the case with the student of natural science. Newton sees the apple fall to the ground that is an effect, and he refers it to gravitation, that is to the cause.
Simmel does not directly emphasize the peculiar advantage of natural science, namely, experiment. Science can produce the cause and can directly observe the emergence of the effect from it. It goes without saying that this is an advantage which cannot be too highly estimated. It might, however, be said that there is some compensation for this advantage in the psychical sciences, inasmuch as the observer can reproduce in himself various psychic conditions which are regarded as causes. This is also a sort of experiment, though somewhat less reliable.
Nor can I with Simmel regard normative history, even as it is today written, merely as a preparatory and transitional stage like metaphysics. In my judgment the metaphysical stage in history is already passed. It lasted so long as men assumed divine Providence as the one principle from which to derive all historical occurrences. Since, however, in recent times we call in the various sciences such as ethnology, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and so forth, to explain separate facts as well as the totality of historical evolution, historiography may with right claim a high degree of exactitude, in spite of all theoret- ical difficulties which are in reality common to all departments of knowledge.
I admit, to be sure, that in this connection historical material- ism is a return to metaphysics, in the sense that it erects a single invariable principle from which all history is made to proceed. That materialism has quite as much metaphysics in it as idealism has been long understood. So far as the theory of knowledge is concerned it is a matter of entire indifference whether divine
