Method of Study in Social Science: A Lecture Delivered Before the St. Louis Social Science Association, March 4, 1879

Portada
G. I. Jones, 1879 - 23 páginas
 

Páginas seleccionadas

Otras ediciones - Ver todas

Términos y frases comunes

Pasajes populares

Página 13 - Knowing the heart of man is set to be The centre of this world, about the which These revolutions of disturbances Still roll ; where all the aspects of misery Predominate ; whose strong effects are such As he must bear, being powerless to redress...
Página 23 - Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range, Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.
Página 7 - As man ascends out of Nature in time and space into human nature, he ascends into a realm of his own creation, and therefore into a realm of freedom. The world of material nature is not self-limited. The chief attribute of matter is exclusiveness. Impenetrability is an essential quality of it. Two bodies can not occupy the same place, nor can one body occupy two places. Hence the material necessities of life — food, clothing, and shelter — are essentially brute necessities, having selfishness...
Página 6 - Man as a child or a savage is an incarnate contradiction; his real being is the opposite of his ideal being. His actual condition does not conform to his true nature. His true human nature is reason; his actual condition is irrational, for it is constrained from without; chained by brute necessity, and lashed by the scourges of appetite and passion. There is thus a paradoxical contrast between nature and human nature. ... As man ascends out of nature in time and space into human nature, he ascends...
Página 12 - ... member, a co-operating link; and, besides this, a more complete individual, a more perfect, self-determining being. In the state, in the Church, the individual finds new selves. To know one's self, then, means to know also society; to know not only the particular individual self which I am, but my universal self, realized above me in a series of vast colossal forms. To rise into higher selves, and to know himself in these higher selves, is the destination of man.
Página 5 - ... entire history of all its species, in whatever climes they grow. . . . We must trace whatever we see through its antecedent forms, and learn its cycles of birth, growth, and decay. . . . We must learn to see each individual thing in the perspective of its history. . . . as a part of a process. . . . The ordinary habit of mind occupies itself with the objects of the senses, and does not seek their unity; . . . the scientific habit of mind chooses its object, and persistently follows its thread...
Página 11 - From the fact that all merely natural beings — whether mineral, plant, or animal — never rise to the form of selfknowing and self-realizing, it follows that the application of scientific method to the explanation of human institutions in the ordinary form, is not valid. In nature we explain the present by the past. If we attempt to explain the institutions of the family, society, and the State by the rudimentary forms found in the childhood of the race, or, still worse, by the habits of the higher...
Página 11 - Through all civil history, perhaps, one can find a principle of progress, but it is no complete cycle, like the process of the seasons or the life of the plant. Instead of interpreting the present by the past, we interpret both the present and the past by the future — by the ideal of freedom and Rational Life towards which human history approaches as a goal. In Social Science we deal with an object whose beginning is here but whose end is in eternity. We explain each and every phase of his past...
Página 6 - But he knows a place where it does not apply and can not reach; a place so far set off from nature that it requires a new method of study, and gives rise to a new kind of science different from the common kind; and this, strange to say, is social science. He says: " Social science deals with man. Man has a natural being as a mere animal, as well as a spiritual being of intellect and will. . . . Man is not only an animal, having bodily wants of food, clothing, and shelter, but he is a spiritual being,...
Página 11 - ... civil history, perhaps, one can find a principle of progress, but it is no complete cycle, like the process of the seasons or the life of the plant. Instead of interpreting the present by the past, we interpret both the present and the past by the future — by the ideal of freedom and Rational Life towards which human history approaches as a goal. In Social Science we deal with an object whose beginning is here, but whose end is in eternity. 'We explain each and every phase of his past and present...

Información bibliográfica