Hierarchy of the Sciences

Comte's second best known theory, that of the hierarchy of the sciences, is intimately connected with the Law of Three Stages. Just as mankind progresses only through determinant stages, each successive stage building on the accomplishments of its predecessors, so scientific knowledge passes through similar stages of development. But different sciences progress at different rates. "Any kind of knowledge reaches the positive stage early in proportion to its generality, simplicity, and independence of other departments." Hence astronomy, the most general and simple of all natural sciences, develops first. In time, it is followed by physics, chemistry, biology, and finally, sociology. Each science in this series depends for its emergence on the prior developments of its predecessors in a hierarchy marked by the law of increasing complexity and decreasing generality.

The social sciences, the most complex and the most dependent for their emergence on the development of all the others, are the "highest" in the hierarchy. "Social science offers the attributes of a completion of the positive method. All the others . . . are preparatory to it. Here alone can the general sense of natural law be decisively developed, by eliminating forever arbitrary wills and chimerical entities, in the most difficult case of all." Social science "enjoys all the resources of the anterior sciences" but, in addition, it uses the historical method which "investigates, not by comparison, but by gradual filiation." "The chief phenomenon in sociology . . . that is, the gradual and continuous influence of generations upon each other--would be disguised or unnoticed, for want of the necessary key--historical analysis."

Although sociology has special methodological characteristics that distinguish it from its predecessors in the hierarchy, it is also dependent upon them. It is especially dependent on biology, the science that stands nearest to it in the hierarchy. What distinguishes biology from all the other natural sciences is its holistic character. Unlike physics and chemistry, which proceed by isolating elements, biology proceeds from the study of organic wholes. And it is this emphasis on organic or organismic unity that sociology has in common with biology. "There ca be no scientific study of society either in its conditions or its movements, if it is separated into portions, and its divisions in its conditions or its movements, if it is separated into portions, and its divisions are studied apart." The only proper approach in sociology consists in "viewing each element in the light of the whole system. . . . In the inorganic sciences, the elements are much better known to us than the whole which they constitute: so that in that case we must proceed from the simple to the compound. But the reverse method is necessary in the study of Man and Society; Man and Society as a whole being better known to us, and more accessible subjects of study, than the parts which constitute them."

From Coser, 1977:9.

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