Identifier: americanaunivers14newy (find matches)
Title: The Americana; a universal reference library, comprising the arts and sciences, literature, history, biography, geography, commerce, etc., of the world
Year: 1908 (1900s)
Authors:
Subjects: Encyclopedias and dictionaries
Publisher: New York : Scientific American Compiling Dept.
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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a most general type, withMathematics, and goes from that to astronomy,from that to physics, then to chemistry, then tobiology, and finally to sociology. Spencerssystem is essentially an elaboration of Comtes.He. too. begins with the most abstract science,mathematics; progress is then to the abstractconcrete sciences wdiich deal with the generalforces of the universe, mechanics, physics, andchemistry, for which mathematics is the pre-supposition, and thence tn the concrete sci-ences which refer to single objects: that is, toastronomy, geology, and biology, while psychol-ogy and sociology become special parts of biol-ogv. The shortcomings of all these efforts areevident as soon as we consider that such posi-tivistic systems crowd the totality of mentaland morn! sciences and all that refers to historyand civilization under the conception of sociol-ogy. That means, of course, a strictly natural-istic aspect of the history of culture. .Ml thatthe inner civilization of mankind has produced.
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II SCIENCES, CLASSIFICATION OF politics and law, literature and art, knowledgeand religion and philosophy, become then noth-ing but functions of the biological organism;and yet everyone who takes the standpoint ofthe historian or jurist, of the philosopher oriheologian, feels the artificiality of such anaturalistic standpoint for these disciplines.The principle of grouping the sciences withreference to their logical relation is, however,in itself, of course, not responsible for thisartificiality and for this unfairness to thel.istorical and cultural disciplines. It was thematerialistic metaphysics of those positivisticsystems which brought about this overweight■ if natural science. On idealistic ground thereference to logical relations yielded accord-mgly a system of very different type. InHegels philosophical system, for instance, thesciences are brought, too, into logical relationswith fullest justice to the demands of the moralsciences. But while the Hegelian system has lost itsi

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