it must receive is, or should be, the rising and arching shaft of psychology. But, alas! this shaft is yet too imperfectly built to support effectively, and hence the present unsteady condition of the whole fabric of science so far as it relates to man.
Thus, then, there are two fundamental sciences upon which sociology must rest. These are on the material side biology and on the spiritual side psychology. But sociology, like all other sciences, must first rise on its own basis of observed and collated facts and phenomena. Therefore we may describe the process of the building of a scientific sociology as follows: First, social facts, or building materials, are gathered in chronicles and detailed histories: this is descriptive sociology. Then these facts are collated and reduced to laws, the materials are chiseled and fitted and cemented into a rising column: this is formal sociology, or philosophic history and political economy. Then the column arches and connects in one direction with the more fundamental science of biology, and in another direction with that of psychology, and thus becomes causal or true scientific sociology. On this triune arch (not double arch, for the columns stand in triangle) rests the broad triply supported platform of social science, and from this must hereafter rise the beautiful shaft of increasing social knowledge.
On this triply-supported platform there are three regions from which spring respectively three shafts, distinct yet united to form one. The social organism is composed of three subordinate organisms; the social body is composed of three fundamental coördinate corporations, connected each most closely with one of the supporting columns. These are—1. The political organization; 2. The moral and religious organization; and, 3. The industrial organization: or the state, the church, and the guild. The first is connected directly with the history column; the second with the psychology column; and the third with the scientific column. They may be compared (though the comparison may be considered fanciful) to the three great regions of the organic body, viz., the head, the thorax, and the abdomen, or rather to the three great coordinate systems of the animal organism, viz., the nervous system, the blood and respiratory system, and the digestive system; the first controlling and directing, the second warming and vivifying, the third furnishing aliment. They correspond also to the three great divisions of the psyche, viz., the intellect, the affections, the will: the first directing and controlling; the second giving motive-stimulus, energy; the third, active and executive. They correspond finally to the three subordinate and coördinate courses of a perfect human culture insisted upon in my article "On Liberal Education,"[1] viz.: 1. The Language-Art course, commencing with language, ancient and modern, passing upward through literature, art, history, philosophical history, and thus connecting with sociology through the political organization or the state; 2. The Philosophic course, commencing with logic and passing
- ↑ "Southern Presbyterian Review," 1859.
