"Social physics is that science which occupies itself with social phenomena, considered in the same light as astronomical, physical, chemical, and physiological phenomena, that is to say as being subject to natural and invariable laws, the discovery of which is the special object of its researches."(Auguste Comte)

"Natural scientists, since the days of Newton and his immediate predecessors, had developed explanatory schemes in which the previous vain quest for first and final causes had been abandoned and had been replaced by the study of laws, that is, of "invariable relations of succession and resemblance." Instead of relying on the authority of tradition, the new science relied on "reasoning and observation, duly combined" as the only legitimate means of attaining knowledge. Every scientific theory must be based on observed facts, but it is equally true that "facts cannot be observed without the guidance of some theory."

"The new social sciences that Comte sought to establish he first called "social physics;" later, when he thought that the term had been "stolen" from him by the Belgian social statistician, Adolphe Quetelet, he coined the word "sociology," a hybrid term compounded of Latin and Greek parts. It was to be patterned after the natural sciences, not only in its empirical methods and epistemological underpinnings, but also in the functions it would serve for mankind. Far from being of theoretical interest alone, the social sciences, like the natural sciences, must ultimately be of concrete benefit to man and play a major part in the amelioration of the human condition.(Coser,1977)