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SECTION IX The Economic Function: Part II 1. The Individual Per Se as Subject Matter of Social Science Lecture XXVIII. May 27, 1901 THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD has taken possession of the physical region much more than ofthe social or personal region and the immediate result is in many respects confusing. That point may be illustrated further in this way. This increase ofthe environment with reference to which industrial processes are carried on is due very directly to the advances in applied science. It is the application of science to modes of production and to modes oftransportation which has made the market for which production is carried on almost a world market. Physically speaking, then, the relationship between the producer and the consumer has been indefinitely extended. The producer and consumer are very far apart in space, but that physical distance has been very far overcome so they are brought into commercial relationships with each other. But there has been no adequate corresponding development which covers the distance on the sociological personal side. Mr. Hobson,l in an essay the purport ofwhich is to establish the need ofsome state regulation ofindustry, some socialistic scheme, compares the industrial situation to two men working on opposite sides ofa wall, each one working industriously for the needs of the other man. But each left to guess the need ofthe other man. One man needs shoes and the other man needs hats. So they both guess that the other needs hats and so there are too many hats but nobody has shoes. 1. Presumably the economist John Atkinson Hobson. 403 404 John Dewey Whether the remedy suggested is a good one or not, production is controlled by a hypothesis regarding wants which are physically remote ; and yet with physical agencies equal to bridging the distance but without intellectual agencies which are equal to it, so that the hypothesis which is controlling the other man's activity is speculative in character. By the advances of science, of intelligence (I do not mean merely an advance of mere technological categories of the social and the psychological sciences but rather the sytematic organization as well of the facts) the situation may be improved. To pursue that at length would involve the question ofwhat the real character of social science is. We need not go into that further than to say that the terms ofsocial science are individuals with their groupings with each other and that individuals are the most concrete phenomena that there are. It is for that reason that the social sciences are backward. By the nature ofthe case the more abstract the subject matter the more facile the development of the science. To say that it is abstract means that only those phenomena are taken which do lend themselves most easily to treatment from the standpoint of the method or the law, and the residual phenomena are simply left out of account. On the other hand, the abstraction that is made becomes a method (in time) for attacking the phenomena which have been ignored, from which the abstraction has been made. Mathematics, which represents the ultimate abstraction regarding the nature of experience, becomes a tool which, though abstracted from the physical facts, becomes a method for attacking those physical facts. And individuals in their relations to each other (which are the ultimate concrete facts) must lie outside the domain ofscientific method for the longest time. What goes by the name of "Social Science" is rather an attempt to develop a method for social science than the Social Science itself. In the other sciences individuals are useful in order to define the problems, to furnish data, to give illustrations. But, after all, the concern is not with the individual as such. Of course we could not do anything with Botany ifit were not for the individual plants. But, after all, the botanist does not care particularly about this individual plant except as an illustration of some process or law. When you come to Social Science that ceases to be the case. It is the individual as such that is of concern, not merely the individual as data or illustration of something else. For that reason there can be no adequate Social Science until there is something which brings you into relation not merely with the form ofindividuality but with the content ofindividuality, with the specific individual. Of course there must first be an organization of principles, standpoints, etc., which will give a working technique or method for...

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