, in all their uniqueness and individuality, the
actual events of life.[12]

Like every other species of animal, man has a natural history.
Anthropology is the science of man considered as one of the animal
species, _Homo sapiens_. History and sociology, on the other hand, are
concerned with man as a person, as a "political animal," participating
with his fellows in a common fund of social traditions and cultural
ideals. Freeman, the English historian, said that history was "past
politics" and politics "present history." Freeman uses the word
politics in the large and liberal sense in which it was first used by
Aristotle. In that broad sense of the word, the political process, by
which men are controlled and states governed, and the cultural process,
by which man has been domesticated and human nature formed, are not, as
we ordinarily assume, different, but identical, procedures.

All this suggests the intimate relations which exist between history,
politics, and sociology. The important thing, however, is not the
identities but the distinctions. For, however much the various
disciplines may, in practice, overlap, it is necessary for the sake of
clear thinking to have their limits defined. As far as sociology and
history are concerned the differences may be summed up in a word. Both
history and sociology are concerned with the life of man as man.
History, however, seeks to reproduce and interpret concrete events as
they actually occurred in time and space. Sociology, on the other hand,
seeks to arrive at natural laws and generalizations in regard to human
nature and society, irrespective of time and of place.

In other words, history seeks to find out what actually happened and how
it all came about. Sociology, on the other hand, seeks to explain, on
the basis of a study of other instances, the nature of the process
involved.

By nature we mean just that aspect and character of things in regard to
which it is possible to make general statements and formulate laws. If
we say, in explanation of the peculiar behavior of some individual, that
it is natural or that it is after all "simply human nature," we are
simply saying that this behavior is what we have learned to expect of
this individual or of human beings in general. It is, in other words, a
law.

Natural law, as the term is used here, is any statement which describes
the behavior of a class of objects or the character of a class of acts.
For example, the