e and a point of view,
the area of historical investigation has vastly widened and a number of
new social sciences have come into existence--ethnology, archaeology,
folklore, the comparative studies of cultural materials, i.e., language,
mythology, religion, and law, and in connection with and closely related
with these, folk-psychology, social psychology, and the psychology of
crowds, which latter is, perhaps, the forerunner of a wider and more
elaborate political psychology. The historians have been very much
concerned with these new bodies of materials and with the new points of
view which they have introduced into the study of man and of society.
Under the influences of these sciences, history itself, as James Harvey
Robinson has pointed out, has had a history. But with the innovations
which the new history has introduced or attempted to introduce, it does
not appear that there have been any fundamental changes in method or
ideology in the science itself.

Fifty years have elapsed since Buckle's book appeared, and I
know of no historian who would venture to maintain that we had
made any considerable advance toward the goal he set for
himself. A systematic prosecution of the various branches of
social science, especially political economy, sociology,
anthropology, and psychology, is succeeding in explaining many
things; but history must always remain, from the standpoint of
the astronomer, physicist, or chemist, a highly inexact and
fragmentary body of knowledge.... History can no doubt be
pursued in a strictly scientific spirit, but the data we
possess in regard to the past of mankind are not of a nature to
lend themselves to organization into an exact science,
although, as we shall see, they may yield truths of vital
importance.[10]

History has not become, as Comte believed it must, an exact science, and
sociology has not taken its place in the social sciences. It is
important, however, for understanding the mutations which have taken
place in sociology since Comte to remember that it had its origin in an
effort to make history exact. This, with, to be sure, considerable
modifications, is still, as we shall see, an ambition of the science.

II. HISTORICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL FACTS

Sociology, as Comte conceived it, was not, as it has been characterized,
"a highly important point of view," but a fundamental science, i.e., a
method of investig