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“ In our day, is not the simplest demonstration based on facts more highly esteemed than the most specious system though defended by more or less ingenious inductions? But as I did not know him at the period of his life when his cogitations were, no doubt, the most productive of results, I can only conjecture that the bent of his work must have been from that of his first efforts of thought. ”

“ And as ceteris paribus our tense awareness of active states always throws into insignificance a passive state sandwiched between them; so, bent as we are upon our red and black extensions, and their comparative lengths and directions, we shall treat the uninteresting white extensions as a blank, a gap, as that which separates the objects of our active interest, and takes what existence it has for our mind only from its relation of separating those interesting actively measured and compared lines. ”

“ Setting out, then, with this general principle, that the properties of the units determine the properties of the aggregate, we conclude that there must be a Social Science expressing the relations between the two with as much definiteness as the natures of the phenomena permit. Beginning with types of men who form but small and incoherent social aggregates, such a science has to show in what ways the individual qualities, intellectual and emotional, negative further aggregation. ”

“ If we contemplate the whole field of human knowledge, attained or attainable, we find that it separates itself obviously, and as it were spontaneously, into two divisions, which stand so strikingly in opposition and contradistinction to one another, that in all classifications of our knowledge they have been kept apart. These are, physical science, and moral or psychological science. ”

“ Our studies of character, to change the image, are very much like the surveyor's triangulation of a geographical province. We get a base-line in organization, always; then we get an angle by sighting some distant object to which the passions or aspirations of the subject of our observation are tending ”

“ We are slowly beginning to recognize that there may be a science of History, a science of Language, a science of Religion, and, in fact, that all knowledge may be systematized on a common method. The facts of the External Order, which yield a cosmology, are supplemented by the facts of the Internal Order, which yield a psychology, and the facts of the Social Order, which yield a sociology. ”

“ It should be fed to the mind with an intelligent purpose in view, and that purpose should be the preparation of the mind for ultimately entering the last and most difficult as well as most important field of human thought, that of sociology. Therefore history, political economy, and the other generic branches should first be prosecuted as constituting the necessary preparation for the study of the higher ordinal principles. ”

“ The problem that confronts you, then, in either kind of analysis, however formal or informal it may be, is, How shall I go to work? The first necessity is the choosing of a basis for division of the subject, whether it be in classification or partition. The necessity for this arises from the demand of the human mind for logical consistency. Life seems often wildly inconsistent, but we demand that explanation of it or any phase of it be arranged according to what seems to us some logical law of progression, some consistent point of view. ”

“ What we have said of empirical generalizations from times past to times still to come, holds equally true of similar generalizations from present times to times past; when persons whose acquaintance with moral and social facts is confined to their own age, take the men and the things of that age for the type of men and things in general, and apply without scruple to the interpretation of the events of history, the empirical laws which represent sufficiently for daily guidance the common phenomena of human nature at that time and in that particular state of society. ”

“ The conflict has objective worth because it is the antecedent condition and cue of thought. Deny an organization of things within which competing incompatible tendencies appear and thinking becomes merely "mental." [124]
Every reflective attitude and function, whether of naïve life, deliberate invention, or controlled scientific research, has risen through the medium of some such total objective situation. The abstract logician may tell us that sensations or impressions, or associated ideas, or bare physical things, or conventional symbols, are antecedent conditions. ”

“ When he classes a certain word as a conjunction, a certain city as a trade center, a certain problem as one in percentage, he is using deduction. Complexes and gradual shadings of one state into another, not clearly defined and sharply differentiated processes and states, are characteristic of all mental life. ”

“ The behaviour of large aggregates of human beings, as we have already learned, exhibits approximate uniformity, at least in many respects, and may thus be treated as to all intents and purposes mechanical in those respects. Hence it is possible to have a number of empirical sciences of human nature, such as Ethnology and Sociology, in which those uniformities are collected and codified, and to base on these sciences a number of general prudential maxims for the regulation of our behaviour towards our fellow-men considered in the abstract. ”

“ You are an integral factor, so to speak, of the social problem, but your value is determined by your relation to other quantifies in the complex system with which you are identified. As a segregated unit, you diminish in value. ”

“ And then we are told that the aggregate of the faint is what we call the mind, the subject, the ego; the aggregate of the vivid is what we call the external world, the object, the non-ego. [69] It would seem, then, that the aggregate of vivid subjective affections is the objective world so far as knowable. ”

“ Of course, here again it is some particular problem that defines the search for the general and directs attention to some class characteristics rather than to others. Not only is the starting point of all reasoning some definite situation for which there is no adequate response, but the end point must naturally be the same. A particular problem demanding solution is the cause for reasoning, and, of course, the end of the process must be the solution of that problem. ”

“ Each determined potency marks a determined quantitative difference of the subjective and objective. Each individual Being is the result of a quantitative difference of subjectivity and objectivity. The individual expresses absolute identity under a determined form of Being:” so that each side is itself a relative totality, A = B, and at the same time the one factor preponderates in the one, and the other factor in the other, but both remain absolute identity. ”

“ And so the balance sways and the story runs—here a gain, there a loss, and Nature’s great average struck across the two, whereof the sum total forms one of the factors in that mighty equation in which the result will equal the unknown quantity of her purpose. ”

“ And therefore your suggestion that one factor should not be dwelt on rather than others would be bad to follow,—first, because all are not equal either in importance or interest, and secondly because the circumstance related or studied must be considered especially in relation to the principal factor of the psychological state which that circumstance has evoked. ”

“ Social phaenomena, like all others, present two aspects, the statical, and the dynamical; the phaenomena of equilibrium, and those of motion. The statical aspect is that of the laws of social existence, considered abstractedly from progress, and confined to what is common to the progressive and the stationary state. The dynamical aspect is that of social progress. The statics of society is the study of the conditions of existence and permanence of the social state. The dynamics studies the laws of its evolution. The first is the theory of the consensus, or interdependence of social phaenomena. ”

“ If the formation of individual character is already a complex subject of study, this subject must be, in appearance at least, still more complex; because the number of concurrent causes, all exercising more or less influence on the total effect, is greater, in the proportion in which a nation, or the species at large, exposes a larger surface to the operation of agents, psychological and physical, than any single individual. ”

“ We can divide all relations into two classes; first, relations of comparison, which originate at the moment when our perfectly voluntary attention brings any two elements, or rather their mental images, into a contact with each other that is quite indifferent and unessential to the elements themselves. ”

“ Each category, or determination, is a general principle by which we seek to make experience a consistent whole and render it a concrete universal; and each has its own way of relating the two root factors, viz., unity and difference. ”

“ So soon as experience shows us a contingent being, we know the necessity of its cause; we also infer the necessity of the proportions, which the activity producing must preserve with the thing produced; knowing the qualities of the latter, we infer those which ought to be found in the former. In this manner, resting upon two bases, one of which is ideal truth and the other real truth, or data supplied by experience, we construct a true positive science referred to determinate facts. ”

“ The second principle I shall take notice of is that of comparison, or the variation of our judgments concerning objects, according to the proportion they bear to those with which we compare them. We judge more of objects by comparison than by their intrinsic worth and value; and regard every thing as mean, when set in opposition to what is superior of the same kind. ”

“ All thought begins with conceptions to a certain extent generalised, and thence is developed in two directions. On the one hand, generalisations become wider and wider, binding together by common properties a larger and larger number of phenomena, and so embracing a wider field of the world of facts. ”

“ But a world of living intelligent agents in social relations is in its very presuppositions a world of activity, of mutual understanding and adjustment. Rationalistic theory, led astray by geometrical conceptions, conceived that a universal criterion must be like a straight line, a fixed and timeless—or eternal—entity. ”

“ Then we must remember that these external and internal evolutions of social life, take place often unconsciously, making comparisons and distinctions without reflecting on their nature or limits; we must remember that it is the business of reflective comparison, of the comparative method, to retrace this development consciously, and to seek the causes which have produced it. ”

“ In certain branches of science we can ascertain our personal equation, the measure of difference between our own judgments and an average standard: may there not be some corresponding correction of our personal partialities in moral theorizing? ”

“ He can say: ‘My world is One Being, a single, real, but perhaps an internally complex, yes an infinitely wealthy Being, whose various aspects and functions are not logically independent, but are linked in a system, so that fully to define one part or region would be to define something of the essence of all, and so that no portion can indefinitely alter or wholly vanish without some implied change, however minute, in all the other parts. ”

“ The second class, on the contrary,—that of objective relations,—expresses a proportion which is not merely constituted between things by our thinking in an arbitrary way, but which is really extant for the things themselves in such manner that they are reciprocally affected in this same proportion. ”

“ When in a situation associated with the evolution of the society, a decision has to be taken; on image models, the decision is based on feelings, or impressions, or some local models. On a symbolic model, such a decision is based on parameters and their associated values. ”

“ As the several circumstances that determine the early or late recognition of uniformities, are circumstances that determine the number and strength of the impressions which these uniformities make on the mind; it follows that the progression conforms to a certain fundamental principle of psychology. We see à posteriori, what we concluded à priori, that the order in which relations are generalized, depends on the frequency and impressiveness with which they are repeated in conscious experience. ”

“ The most universal of the forms in which this difference of method is accustomed to present itself, is the ancient feud between what is called theory, and what is called practice or experience. There are, on social and political questions, two kinds of reasoners: there is one portion who term themselves practical men, and call the others theorists ”

“ Absolute perfection, of which God is the type, consists in the infinite distance between these two terms in this relation, viz., effort none, result infinite.
The second system maintains that it is the effort itself which forms the measure of, and constitutes, our riches. Progression is the increase of the proportion of the effect to the result. ”

“ Once more the attention of the reader is called to the relations which exist between the five essentials and which are then found in the five properties, then found in the five categories, then found in the five properties of change, then in the five properties of life, then in the five properties of mind. Kinds are not alone classified, but forms, forces, qualities, and concepts are classified. ”