sciences, there were other discoveries and inventions which by even more slow and difficult processes have grown into the social arts and sciences. Are we not to include among the founders of sociology the unknown discoverers and early improvers of the spoken and written language, of music and the fine arts; of the expression of ideals and their social uses? These processes of social invention and discovery set agoing, society finds itself in possession of a thaumaturgic agency which, operating on the elemental passions, is capable of transforming men into either gods or devils. Are not the limits of biological evolution transcended when, psychically speaking, the childless man acquires spiritual potentiality of countless offspring; and at the same time the individual acquires the spiritual potentiality of choosing, within limits, his own ancestry? And, by the same mysterious psychic forces, fear becomes convertible into courage, egoism into altruism, mating into marriage, courtesy into chivalry, kinship into humanism, resentment into sympathy, and sympathy into saintship. But the reverse processes are also seen to be easily set in operation, with their indefinite possibilities of moral and social degeneration. According to circumstances (the conditions being increasingly definable by the scientifically minded) the thaumaturgic agent acts either as dynamic of progress or as a furnace of degeneration—as white magic or as black magic.

The theologian may in theory have asserted that the fall was a prehistoric incident, but since the age of culture began, every constructive priest, every meditative parent, has in practice known that it is a perennial occurrence. He has, too, known that it has to be guarded against both by the negative processes of prevention and elimination, and by the positive processes of cultural rebirth and education. Thus the perennial problem has beenif one may put it so without anachronism-the sociological question how to breed and train Platos and Bayards rather than Neros and Judases: Monicas and Beatrices rather than Messalinas and Cleopatras. Are not all who have contributed to this question to be counted as in some sense among the founders of sociology?

The answers made to the question are to be found in the cus

toms and usages which regulate or constrain conduct, in the laws and institutions of the temporal and of the spiritual government, in so far as these customs and usages, laws and institutions, are not themselves the products of degeneratory processes and the creations of vicious or antisocial ideals. The knowledge on which these laws and institutions have been based, the ideas associated with these constraining customs and usages of social conduct, are, of course, only partially set forth in history and literature. To disclose this knowledge and these ideas, and to exhibit them in themselves and in relation to other phenomena moral and material apart from their immediate practical uses, is one of the main aims of the special cultivators of sociological science. And the point to be observed here is that from the beginnings of language up to the highest and latest generalizations of science, sociological or other, is one continuous process of psychic evolution, in which only for purposes of practical convenience we can draw arbitrary lines and say here empiricism ends and science begins. The gist of this is well expressed in Condillac's saying that "science is only a well-made language." The crude language of everyday experiences gets refined into literature; literature is, or should be, tested and verified and systematized by sociological science. And then, touched again by this spirit of literature, the truths of science are ready to pass back into the common experience, fortifying it and enriching it.

A correspondent once wrote to ask Ruskin what was the remedy for lust. The answer came back that there was one cure only for lust, and that was love. In saying that, Ruskin was not so much expressing a new idea (Plato, and doubtless many others, have it) as summarizing a mass of social experience in a very convenient and thought-economizing formula. In other words, he formulated a law of sociology. Now, most of the known laws of sociology have been formulated in this haphazard sort of way. They have, as it were, been discovered by chance, and to chance it has been left to determine whether they should be verified, modified, developed, systematized, applied, perverted, or forgotten. To attend to all these matters to take them out of the region of chance, to bring them into the domain of human organi

zation is the business of science. For the most part, every man has hitherto been his own sociologist. And that is as it should be, provided he has the desire to contribute in fullest measure his social experience to the common fund, and has the knowledge of how to do this. For that, two conditions are necessary: the science of sociology must have reached a certain degree of systematization, and the individual must have undergone an appropriate social education. How far these conditions are at present fulfilled is a matter that merits the most careful investigation. The fact that there exists, especially among the educated classes, so deep and widespread prejudice against the systematization of sociological knowledge is itself symptomatic of serious defects in social education. The truth of Shaftesbury's proposition that the quickest way to become a fool is by system need not be disputed. The obstacles to thought that are generated by a premature and ill-advised system are obvious enough. But the other half of the truth needs emphasizing, viz., that for want of systematization much of the wisdom of individuals is lost to the world and still more remains unutilized. To systematize knowledge is to throw it open so that every adequately educated person may draw upon it or contribute to it from his own experience. Unceasing systematization, more even in sociology than in other sciences, is the necessary condition of that ultimate co-operation between individuals and between groups, between generations and between ages, which marks the transition from instinct to reason, from empiricism to science. No one objects to order, whether in the arrangement of ideas in a book or garments in a wardrobe. And what is system but order developed to a higher degree of social usefulness? What order is in individual economy, system is in social economy. Anyone who utters sweeping and unqualified condemnation of systematization thereby declares himself an unsocialized type.

What distinguishes the scientific sociologist is not primarily the mass and quality of his social experience, but the manner in which he acquires it, arranges it, and uses it. Both the quantity and the quality of one's social experiences are, of course, conditioned by the mode of its acquisition, arrangement, and utiliza

tion. But conventionally to separate these two aspects of life experience, on the one hand, and the mode of its building up, on the other—is a convenient way of defining a mental position in regard to social education. We want to be able to say to the empirical sociologists: "There is a certain position in sociology; reach it, and you will be amply rewarded. There are certain sociological habits of mind, certain propensities to social action; acquire these, and you will taste the pleasures of scientific discovery and feel the joys of artistic creation in their highest fields, viz., in the knowledge of human action and the creation of human character."

What in detail are these sociological habits of mind, these propensities to social action? Man, of all the higher animals, is born into the world with the least powers of self-adaptation. As an eminent biologist has put it, the human animal has the fewest ready-made tricks of the nerve centers; which is a psychological way of saying that children require a great deal more education than puppies or kittens. How these defects of human instinct have in the course of ages been transformed into qualities of human reason is just the history of education—which, in its highest sense, is the history of social evolution—or, from another point of view, social evolution in history.

In the sphere of the fine arts, more than in any other fields of human activity, individual effort is believed to depend inost on inherited propensities. And yet, even here, what prodigious feats of self-education have characterized the apprentice period of the lives of most-perhaps of all-of the great masters! Leonardo, as he is the artist of artists, so is he also the student of students, engaged up to the very end of his life in a systematic exploration of new fields of experience. What Michael Angelo said of Raphael—" he did not possess his art from nature, but by study". -was said of Michael Angelo himself by Sir Joshua Reynolds. His ripest counsel to young artists, that in which he summarized his own life of experience, was this, that "the habit of contemplating and brooding over the ideas of the great geniuses until you find yourself warmed by the contact is the true method of forming an artist-like mind."

And are not the same principles demonstrated and exemplified in application to the making of the poet in the lives of Virgil, of Dante, or of Milton? Sir Joshua's maxim is almost a paraphrase of Dante's thought in contemplating the sages and heroes of antiquity- "the great spirits by whose sight I am exalted in my own esteem."

You cannot hope to become a poet, or a painter, without strenuous educative efforts; still less, perhaps, a sociologist. The sociologist, in the empirical sense the earliest and most primitive of social types, is in the scientific and artistic sense the latest of human types to be evolved. It is the type of the future. And so far we may agree with those who say the science of sociology has yet to be created—provided always that position is not used as an argument for inaction, the deadliest of all the sins. Everyone may make some real contribution to the science of sociology. The one condition is a sustained effort to acquire something of the sociological habit of mind, something of the propensity to social action.

What this sociological habit of mind is, what these social propensities are, we ought to be able to find out most clearly and vividly by a study of the lives and work of the reputed founders of sociology. Of the many different ways in which the problems of sociology have been approached, there are three or four which are sufficiently distinct and characteristic to provide a rough classification of those customarily reckoned founders of the science. There are certain observers of social phenomena who see most clearly and vividly the influence of nature in determining the activities and thoughts of man; and there are others who see most clearly and vividly the internal forces of the mind in their operation upon man himself and his environment. Those who lean to the former position are the more objective, the more observational, the more concrete sociologists. Those who lean to the latter position are the more subjective and abstract sociologists.

All through the history of the science we see the alternate predominance of one or other of these types, and, moreover, in the lives of most individual sociologists there tends to be some