262 THE SOCIAL THEORY OF GEORG SIMMEL 
closely resembles it, owes perhaps more to Comte directly 
than to the more recent German developments. But the 
work of Ribot, Poulhan, and others in the field of feeling 
and sentiment, and other studies in the field of suggestion, 
undoubtedly influenced the development of the social 
sciences. 
With the eighties the psychological point of view had 
begun to be more or less accepted. In the German group it 
was expressed by Tonnies and Gumplowicz, and in the 
French group by de Roberty, de Greef, and Fouillée. In 
this group the doctrine of Fouillée is an interesting com- 
bination of biological and psychological concepts similar 
to that of Schiiffle in Germany. While maintaining that 
society was an organism, he explicitly stated that it was 
of a psychological nature, and he combined these two no- 
tions in the more or less contradictory concept of a con- 
tractual organism. 
With the nineties, the psychological point of view had 
become commonplace, not only in Europe, but also in 
America. France added Tarde and Durkheim, Germany 
Simmel, Ratzenhofer. Stein, and Barth to its adherents; 
and the group of American sociologists, such as Giddings, 
Small, Vincent, and Stuckenberg, had a definite leaning in 
that direction. 
With the acceptance of the psychological point of view 
and the renunciation of the method of organic analogy, a 
great step had been taken in the right direction, but the 
whole road from a philosophy of society to a science of 
association had not yet been traversed. There was agree- 
ment regarding the fundamental nature of society, but 
that was all. There was neither a consensus of opinion re- 
garding the task of sociology nor regarding its subject-mat- 
ter. Some of the adherents of the psychological point of