Spencer Heath Archive

Item 193

Penciled material on notepad paper

About 1942?

Original is missing.

     Social science is only a mass of data, most of it accidental, exceptional, pathological and irrelevant or of minute and narrow significance. The relevant data for a Science of Society is so public and general, of such notorious, omnipresent and long-standing observation, that it has been taken for granted and accepted unconsciously or looked upon biliously as though it were a manifestation not of social functioning but of social disease.

     Because of the well-nigh exclusive attention to the exceptional and pathological there has been no observation of the general functioning, no formulation of uniformities as general principles and therefore a denial of there being any ascertainable natural laws in the field of social phenomena. We therefore have had no science of society notwithstanding our immediate access to its general and continuous phenomena without either aid or need of any special instruments of discovery or observation.

     The reason we have no science in the field of social relations is because we have taken so little account of the uniformities. Science generalizes the data of discrete experiences. It does to the particular in life what algebra does to the particular in arithmetic. But unlike data or experi­ences can no more be generalized and exhibit a principle or law than unlike solutions can be unified in an algebraic process or expression. The essential foundation of any science is always found in the uniformities, the invariables, that induction discovers within the particular field of phenomena with which the science deals. The unvarying numerical uniformity with which specific groups or numbers of objects combine or divide is the basis of arithmetical science — which has the character of a science only because of these uniform relationships being independent of any of the particular objects by means of which they can be operatively verified or sensibly experienced. And this is true not only of the abstract sciences (mathematics and logic) but also of the natural and physical sciences. In each of these it is the invariableness of the phenomena experienced or observed, and this invariableness alone, that is abstracted and formulated as foreknowledge into principles or laws. The sciences, then, are all similar and related in this, that they all consist in descriptions or formulations of constant and uniform processes and behaviors within their respective fields; yet more, the growth of each science has been signalized always by the formulations becoming broader and still more general and embracing ever widening fields. The successive developments of mathematical theory is an elaborate example of this and the same pattern is followed in the physical and biological fields. In all of them the descriptions and formulations become more comprehensive and general, covering a wider range. Not only do the several sciences exhibit this uniformity of evolution among themselves, namely, that of expanding into wider descriptions,

                                         /Breaks off here/