classic illustration of the so-called "universal
proposition" familiar to students of formal logic, "all men are mortal,"
is an assertion in regard to a class of objects we call men. This is, of
course, simply a more formal way of saying that "men die." Such general
statements and "laws" get meaning only when they are applied to
particular cases, or, to speak again in the terms of formal logic, when
they find a place in a syllogism, thus: "Men are mortal. This is a
man." But such syllogisms may always be stated in the form of a
hypothesis. If this is a man, he is mortal. If a is b, a is also
c. This statement, "Human nature is a product of social contact," is a
general assertion familiar to students of sociology. This law or, more
correctly, hypothesis, applied to an individual case explains the
so-called feral man. Wild men, in the proper sense of the word, are not
the so-called savages, but the men who have never been domesticated, of
which an individual example is now and then discovered.

To state a law in the form of a hypothesis serves to emphasize the fact
that laws--what we have called natural laws at any rate--are subject to
verification and restatement. Under the circumstances the exceptional
instance, which compels a restatement of the hypothesis, is more
important for the purposes of science than other instances which merely
confirm it.

Any science which operates with hypotheses and seeks to state facts in
such a way that they can be compared and verified by further observation
and experiment is, so far as method is concerned, a natural science.

III. HUMAN NATURE AND LAW

One thing that makes the conception of natural history and natural law
important to the student of sociology is that in the field of the social
sciences the distinction between natural and moral law has from the
first been confused. Comte and the social philosophers in France after
the Revolution set out with the deliberate purpose of superseding
legislative enactments by laws of human nature, laws which were to be
positive and "scientific." As a matter of fact, sociology, in becoming
positive, so far from effacing, has rather emphasized the distinctions
that Comte sought to abolish. Natural law may be distinguished from all
other forms of law by the fact that it aims at nothing more than a
description of the behavior of certain types or classes of objects. A
description of the way in which a class, i.e., men, plants, animals, or
ph