ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the reaction, scientific and logical, that sociology, once instituted, must exercise, in its turn, on the whole of the preceding sciences—a reaction that is, as yet, even less suspected than the primary action itself. The biologists lose sight of historical observation altogether, and represent sociology as a mere corollary of the science of man, in the same way that physicists and chemists treat biology as a mere derivative from the inorganic philosophy. If sociology is thus subordinated to biology, it must be scientifically related to the whole system of inorganic philosophy, because biology is so. The most marked instance of the operation of social science is in the direct study of social dynamics, in virtue of the principle, so familiar to political theorists by this time, that true coordination must be disclosed by the natural course of the common development.
