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.

But when the politico-social question is entered upon, the new science
of sociology is overpowered by a sort of hypnotic sleep and remains
suspended in a sterile, colorless limbo, thus permitting sociologists to
be in public economy, as in politics, conservatives or radicals, in
accordance with their respective whims or subjective tendencies.

And while Darwinian biology, by the scientific determination of the
relations between the individual and the species, and evolutionist
sociology itself by describing in human society the organs and the
functions of a new organism, was making the individual a cell in the
animal organism, Herbert Spencer was loudly proclaiming his English
individualism extending to the most absolute theoretical anarchism.

A period of stagnation was inevitable in the scientific productive
activity of sociology, after the first original observations in
descriptive social anatomy and in the natural history of human
societies. Sociology represented thus a sort of arrested development in
experimental scientific thought, because those who cultivated it,
wittingly or unwittingly, recoiled before the logical and radical
conclusions that the modern scientific revolution was destined to
establish in the social domain--the most important domain of all if
science was to become the handmaid of life, instead of contenting itself
with that barren formula, science for the sake of science.

The secret of this