ABSTRACT
One of the most basic features for distinguishing the theory of a particular period by application of the scheme is the varying emphasis on the social ontological versus social epistemological-methodological domain. Giddings offers a classification of causes which is explicitly focused on social or sociological causes. Early sociologists were prevailingly dualistic, varying only in the extent to which they stressed the distinctiveness and primacy of materialistic or idealistic features in social causation. Admittedly Cooley, who explicitly accepted an idealist epistemology and an appropriate humanistic methodology, displays little evidence of a commitment to this view of the domain of social life. The comparative-historical methods assume that all mankind is comprehended in a vast, single developmental unity whose general course and component stages in sequence modern social science can and should reconstruct. Positivism has asserted that as part of the realm of nature social phenomena should be studied with objectivity, detachment, or impersonality.
