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lumping them all together in a kind of outer darkness, as in a picture by Rembrandt, with no determined relations at all beyond the merely negative one of doing more harm than good. Carlyle, too, selects a single factor as all-important, viz., the moral force of individuals, of heroes and great men, degrading all the other factors of philosophy of science, and the organized machinery of religion and government, as well as the material and social conditions of men and nations into better or worse appendages merely ; and leaving their positive functions a mere blank, without attempt at scientific determination or co-ordination. Hegel, again, in his Philosophy of History also settles on one factor as all important, in his case that of philosophical concepts or categories ; figuring all the other factors as being dragged along in the train of these by a chain of logical necessity as if they were a kind of baggage ; as if men could act in this world from no motives but philosophical conceptions alone. These three sociologists may be called the specialists of principles, in the same way that the ordinary specialists are specialists of facts; and fall therefore under Professor Durkheim's censure of those who would interpret all social phenomena in terms of one specialism, as of political economy, or of the religious interpretation of history, or what not. Comte, on the other hand, deals with nearly all the factors I have mentioned, but while he draws, in my judgment, the true law of relationship between religion and physical science, he fails, I think, owing to his confusing of concomitants with causes, and putting causes for effects, to give proper weight to the material and social conditions of men and nations, or else he leaves their relationships confused. But this is, of course, only an opinion of my own on which I have no right to dogmatize, and is a proper subject for the discussion of a sociological society. And now for Herbert Spencer what shall we say of his work ? His position is somewhat peculiar, and here I am obliged again to differ from Professor Durkheim, who seems to think that Spencer by positing the differentiation of social types helped to rectify the general conceptions of the Comtist sociology. In my judgment, on the contrary, Spencer has done nothing whatever toward establishing a science of sociology in the true sense of the term, as we have above defined it. For if we consider it, the single law of sociology under which he worked was that of evolution in general, and as that is common alike to the organization of the planets and stars and the growth from the egg of the chick, it is too general for human purposes. The fact that societies in their progress through the ages, like everything else, split and differentiate, passing from a homogeneous to a heterogeneous condition, and integrating while they differentiate, is rather a statement of facts, and a careful sorting of them under the general law of evolution, than a compend of laws connecting the definite social factors of religion, government, science, material and social conditions, etc. However true, therefore, it may be, it cannot fulfil the function of a science of sociology, whereby one or more elements or factors of a society are given, others may be in a meas- ure anticipated or predicted the only true test of a science. What Spencer really accomplished was rather excellent pieces of special work, such as, for example, his tracing of the different stages passed through in the evolution of the conception of God, or the gods and of morality, among savage and civilized races ; but all this, original and suggestive as it was, like everything else of his. formed rather the material on which a science of sociology could operate, than any part of the science itself.
The above were among the main attempts that had been made to establish a science of sociology when I first entered on the study of it some quarter of a century ago. Of my own small contribution to the subject it would be unbecoming in me to say anything, but I may perhaps be permitted to express my entire agreement with Mr. Branford in what he states to be the task imposed on the sociologist at the outset. He lays it down that the sociologist must (i) construct a reasoned account of the existing phase of that interaction of the sciences and of the arts which we call contemporary civilization, (2) that he must reconstruct the corresponding phases which historically have preceded and developed the con- temporary phase, and (3) that he must work out ideals of more ordered develop- ment for the future. Now these, if I may venture to say so, are precisely the problems which I have myself attempted to work out the first in my Civilisation
