It would be of course possible to dispute whether the word "science"
should convey this quality of certitude, but to most people it certainly
does at the present time. So far as the movements of comets and electric
trams go, there is no doubt practically cock-sure science; and Comte and
Herbert Spencer seem to me to have believed that cock-sure could be
extended to every conceivable finite thing. The fact that Herbert
Spencer called a certain doctrine Individualism reflects nothing on the
non-individualizing quality of his primary assumptions and of his mental
texture. He believed that individuality (heterogeneity) was and is an
evolutionary product from an original homogeneity, begotten by folding
and multiplying and dividing and twisting it, and still fundamentally
IT. It seems to me that the general usage is entirely for the limitation
of the word "science" to knowledge and the search after knowledge of a
high degree of precision. And not simply the general usage; "Science is
measurement," Science is "organized commonsense," proud in fact of its
essential error, scornful of any metaphysical analysis of its terms.

Now my contention is that we can arrange the fields of human thought and
interest about the world of fact in a sort of scale. At one end the
number of units is infinite and the methods exact, at the other we have
the human subjects in which there is no exactitude. The science of
society stands at the extreme end of the scale from the molecular
sciences. In these latter there is an infinitude of units; in sociology,
as Comte perceived, there is only one unit. It is true that Herbert
Spencer, in order to get classification somehow, did, as Professor
Durkheim has pointed out, separate human society into societies, and
made believe they competed one with another and died and reproduced just
like animals, and that economists following List have for the purposes
of fiscal controversy discovered economic types; but this is a
transparent device, and one is surprised to find thoughtful and