Introduction to the Science of Sociology — John Shaqi
Introduction to the Science of SociologyPark, Robert Ezra
General
Introduction to the Science of Sociology
Park, Robert Ezra
Sociology
On the other hand it is certain that all interest and values of
life are concerned with what is unique in men and events.
Consider how quickly our appreciation is deadened as some
object is multiplied or is regarded as one case in a thousand.
"She is not the first" is one of the cruel passages in _Faust_.
It is in the individuality and the uniqueness of an object that
all our sense of value has its roots. It is upon this fact that
Spinoza's doctrine of the conquest of the passions by knowledge
rests, since for him knowledge is the submergence of the
individual in the universal, the "once for all" into the
eternal.
The fact that all our livelier appreciations rest upon the
unique character of the object is illustrated above all in our
relations to persons. Is it not an unendurable thought, that a
loved object, an adored person, should have existed at some
other time in just the form in which it now exists for us? Is
it not horrible and unthinkable that one of us, with just this
same individuality should actually have existed in a second
edition?
What is true of the individual man is quite as true of the
whole historical process: it has value only when it is unique.
This is the principle which the Christian doctrine successfully
maintained, as over against Hellenism in the Patristic
philosophy. The middle point of their conception of the world
was the fall and the salvation of mankind as a unique event.
That was the first and great perception of the inalienable
metaphysical right of the historian to preserve for the memory
of mankind, 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.
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