PART THIRD.
Sociology and Socialism.
XIII.
THE STERILITY OF SOCIOLOGY.
One of the strangest facts in the history of the scientific thought of the nineteenth century is that, though the profound scientific revolution caused by Darwinism and Spencerian evolution has reinvigorated with new youth all the physical, biological and even psychological sciences, when it reached the domain of the social sciences, it only superficially rippled the tranquil and orthodox surface of the lake of that social science par excellence, political economy.
It has led, it is true, through the initiative of Auguste Comte—whose name has been somewhat obscured by those of Darwin and Spencer, but who was certainly one of the greatest and most prolific geniuses of our age—to the creation of a new science, Sociology, which should be, together with the natural history of human societies, the crowning glory of the new scientific edifice erected by the experimental method.
I do not deny that sociology, in the department of purely descriptive anatomy of the social organism, has made great and fruitful new contributions to contemporary science, even developing into some specialized branches of sociology, of which criminal sociology, thanks to the labors of the Italian school, has become one of the most important results.