ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapters we have had frequent occasion to note that the social sciences developed in an intellectual climate that had been profoundly affected by the natural sciences. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century changed the European conception of reality and introduced new methods of investigation. Early social scientists, major and minor, conceived of themselves as examining social phenomena in the spirit of ‘natural philosophy’, as exemplified in the fields of astronomy, physics, biology, and chemistry. Until the nineteenth century, the natural sciences impacted on social thought mainly through their general metaphysical and epistemological canons rather than their substantive findings. Such things as Galileo’s model of ballistic motion, or Newton’s investigation of the composition of light, or Boyle’s law of gases, had no application to social phenomena. William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood may have been the original source of the conception of the economy as a circulation of money and commodities that the Physiocrats and some other eighteenth-century economists employed, but as we have seen, that notion played no role in classical economics or the other social sciences that came into existence in the nineteenth century. However, it is evident from our study of Herbert Spencer and Émile Durkheim (Chapter 15) that other features of biological science, theoretical and empirical, general and specific, had a profound influence on the social sciences. In this chapter we shall examine that influence further. But the focus of our attention will have to be widened beyond social science to consider also the influence of biology on social policy, since an outstanding feature of the role of biology in modern social thought has been its direct application to the analysis of social problems, accompanied by specific proposals for their solution.
