ABSTRACT
Vilfredo Pareto's sociology has its origin in the reflections and disappointments of an engineer and an economist. The engineer, unless he is making a mistake, behaves in a logical manner. The economist, so long as he is under no illusions as to his own knowledge, is capable of understanding certain aspects of human behavior. The logical connection between the means and the end exists both in the mind of the actor and in objective reality, and these two relations, one subjective and one objective, correspond to one another. Sociologists who imagine that scientific sociology will be able to lay the foundations for a morality to replace religious dogmas are prisoners of a nonlogical way of thinking without even being aware of it, for they are attributing to science characteristics which it will never possess. Logical actions are, for the most part, those determined by scientific knowledge, by the uniformities which are established by logico-experimental science.
