Waxweiler's education included taking the “highest degree” in engineering from the University of Ghent, and spending a year in the United States, where he studied labor questions and industrial organization (Sarton 1917: 168).
As George Sarton (1924: 168) explained, “The Esquisse displayed a vast programme of research that Waxweiler had been obliged to outline as a working basis for the Institute of Sociology.
Professor Waxweiler defines “social ethology,” or “sociology,” since that term already exists, as “the science, or rather, the physiology of the reactional phenomena due to the mutual excitations of individuals of the same species without distinction of sex.” The basis of social affinity is the “impression of organic likeness (similitude),” and the evolution of man’s nervous system has determined characteristic phenomena from the sociological point of view,—”the faculty of perceiving inter-individually specific likeness of organization proceeds on a par with what is called the manifestations of intelligence, i. e., with the complexity of the nervous system” (p. 74).
Activities are distinguished as conjunctive, protective, injurious, competitive, divulgative, gregarious, repetitive, initiative, acquisitive, selective; the social synergies a[s] conformity, interdependence, cephalization, co-ordination, conscience, etc.
to page) proves the author’s wide reading,—he has made good use of the Pedagogical Seminary and the writings of American devotees of “child study.” But for all this his book is, as he terms it, properly enough, “a sketch.” A useful feature is the “sociological dictionary” (pages 281–295) containing some 2,200 terms without definitions, of more or less sociological import, gleaned from the vocabulary of the French language (Chamberlain 1907: 261–262).