SOCIOLOGICAL INSTRUCTION A T PARIS 209
answer almost as unfavorable to Germany as our first investiga- tion was unfavorable to France.
The German universities have from the very start adopted an indifferent, not to say inimical, attitude toward what might be called the sociological movement, i. e., the tendency to study separately and scientifically the laws of the growth and structure of societies. Thus the author of the article on sociology ( "Gesellschaftswissenschaft") in Conrad's Handworterbuch der Staatswissenscliaften z is in the main disposed to deny the neces- sity of, as well as a place for, the newly proposed study. Of the twenty-one universities in the German Empire only three offer any courses whatsoever in sociology, and but two of these employ the name as a title for them. Even at Berlin, where better opportunities in this field are offered than elsewhere, the number of courses which might attract the sociological student is most insignificant. Most of them, besides, are merely courses in ethnography, ethnology, and anthropology ; indeed, they do not pretend to be aught else, being classified under those sec- tions, and not considered as helps to sociological study.
Paris, on the other hand, has long been a center for investi- gations in social science, and its claims to this title have been steadily growing stronger. It is quite customary for the scien- tific societies which here abound to arrange public courses of lectures, generally popular in character, but often rigorously scientific and specially intended for advanced students. This custom has been observed by a number of societies whose fields of research embrace different phases of social life.
Each of the two societies or groups into which the disciples of Le Play were divided in 1885 has its own "organ," in the shape of a monthly periodical, and has organized its own public courses in social science. Public courses, too, have been arranged by the "Comite de Defense et de Progres Social," but they so evidently serve the purpose of political propaganda and polemic that they should not be mentioned in an account of scientific
ruction. Beside the above courses, and those offered by the
Jena, 1892, Band III, p. 838.
