BOOK I

CHAPTER I THE FUNDAMENTAL ERROR IN MODERN SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY

The interest with which the world in general, throughout the middle portion of this century, has watched the progress of the various positive sciences, would, when we consider how abstruse these sciences are, seem strange and almost inexplicable if it were not for one fact. This fact is the close and obvious bearing which the conclusions of the sciences in question have on traditional Christianity, and, indeed, on any belief in immortality and the divine government of the world. The popular interest in science remains still unabated, but the most careless observer can hardly fail to perceive that the grounds of it are, to a certain extent, very rapidly changing. They are ceasing to be primarily religious, and are becoming primarily social. The theories and discoveries of the savant which are examined with the greatest eagerness are no longer those which affect our {4} prospects of a life in heaven, but those which deal with the possibility of improving our social conditions on earth, and which appeal to us through our sympathies, not with belief or doubt, but with the principles which are broadly contrasted under the names of conservative and revolutionary.

Such being the case, it is hardly necessary to observe that science itself has been undergoing a change likewise. The character of the change, however, requires to be briefly specified. From the time when geologists first startled the orthodox by demonstrating that the universe was more than six thousand years old, and that something more than a week had been occupied in the process of its construction, to the time, comparatively recent, during which the genius of Darwin and others was forcing on the world entirely new ideas with regard to the parentage, and presumably the nature of man, there was a certain limit—a certain scientific frontier—at which positive science practically stopped short. Having sedulously examined the materials and structure of the universe, until on the one hand it reached atoms and molecules, it examined, on the other, the first emergence of organic life, and traced its developments till they culminated in the articulate-speaking human being. It brought us, in fact, to man on the threshold of his subsequent history; and there, till very recently, positive science left him. But now there are signs all round us of a new intellectual movement, analogous to that which accompanied the rise of Darwinism, {5} and science once again is endeavouring to enlarge its borders. Having offered us an explanation of the origin of the animal man, it proposes to deal with the existing conditions of society very much as it dealt with the structure of the human body, to exhibit them as the necessary result of certain far-reaching laws and causes, and to deduce our civilisation of to-day from the condition of the primitive savage by the same methods and by the aid of the same theories as those which it employed in deducing the primitive savage from the brutes, and the brutes in their turn from primitive germ or protoplasm. In other words, the great triumph of science during what we may call its physical period has been the establishment of that theory of development which is commonly spoken of as Evolution, and the application of this to the problems of physics and biology. The object of science in entering on what we may call its social period is the application of this same theory to the problems of civilisation and society.

It is true that, if we use the word science in a certain sense, the attempt to treat social problems scientifically is not in itself new. Political economy, to say nothing of utilitarian ethics, is a social science, or it is nothing; and political economy had already made considerable advances when modern physical science had hardly found its footing. But before long physical science passed it, with a step that was not only more rapid, but also immeasurably firmer, and was presently giving such an example of what {6} accurate science is, that it was thought doubtful whether political economy could be called a science at all. The doubt thus raised cannot be said to have justified itself. In spite of all the attacks that have been made against the earlier economists, their principal doctrines survive to the present day, as being, so far as they go, genuine scientific truths. But whenever the thinker, who has been educated in the school of modern physical science, betakes himself now to the study of society and human action, and begins to apply to these the developed theory of evolution, though he does not reject the doctrines of the earlier economists, he sees them in a new light, by which their significance is profoundly changed. The earlier economists took society as they found it, and they reasoned as though what was true of the economic life around them must be absolutely and universally true of economic life always. Here is the point as to which the thinker of to-day differs from them. He does not dispute the truth of the deductions drawn by them with regard to society as it existed during their own epoch; but, educated by the methods and discoveries of the physical and biological evolutionist, he perceives that society itself is in process of constant change, that many economic doctrines which have been true during the present century had little application to society during the Middle Ages, and that centuries hence they may perhaps have even less. Thus, though he does not repudiate or disregard the economic science of the past, he {7} merges it in a science the scope of which is far wider and deeper. This is a science which primarily sets itself to explain, not how a given set of social conditions affects those who live among them, but how social conditions at one epoch are different from those of another, how each set of conditions is the resultant of those preceding it, and how, since the society of the present differs from that of the past, the society of the future is likely to differ from that of the present.

What political economy has thus lost in precision it has gained in general interest. So long as it merely analysed processes of production and distribution which it was assumed would always continue without substantial modification, political economy was mainly a science for specialists, and was little calculated to arouse any keen interest in the public. But now that it has been merged in that general science of evolution, which offers to an unquiet age what seems a scientific licence to regard as practically producible some indeterminate transformation in these processes, political economy has come to occupy a new position. Instead of being ignored or ridiculed by the more ardent school of reformers, and even neglected by conservatives as a not very powerful auxiliary, it has now been brought down into the dust of the general struggle, and is invoked by one side as the prophetess of new possibilities, and by the other as an exorcist of mischievous and mad illusions. And what is true in this respect with regard to political economy is {8} also true with regard to evolutionary social science as a whole. Social science as a whole, just like this special branch of it, is being brought into vital contact with the lives and hopes of man, and is exciting a popular interest strictly analogous to that which had been excited by physical and biological science previously.

It is doing this in two ways, which, though closely connected, are distinct. In the first place, it is directing our attention to the human race as a whole, and is showing us how society and the individual have developed in an orderly manner, growing upwards from the lowest and the most miserable beginnings to the heights of civilisation, intellectual, moral, and material, and how they contain in themselves the potency of yet further development. It thus offers to the mind a vast variety of suggestion with regard to the significance of man’s presence upon the earth, and is held by many to be supplying us with the materials of a religion calculated to replace that which physical science has discredited. The second way in which it excites popular interest is the way which has been just illustrated by a reference to political economy. For besides offering to our philosophic and religious faculties the vision of man’s corporate movement from a condition of helpless bestiality towards some “far-off divine event,” which glitters on us in the remote future, social science is suggesting to us changes which are of a very much nearer kind, and which appeal not to our speculative desire to discover some {9} meaning in the universe, but to the personal interest which we each of us take in our own welfare—such, for instance, as a general redistribution of wealth, the abolition or complete reorganisation of private property, the emancipation of labour, and the realisation of social equality.

This distinction between the speculative and practical aspects of social science has a special importance, which will be explained and insisted on presently. But it is here mentioned only to show the reader how strong a combination of motives is impelling the present generation—the conservative classes and the revolutionary classes equally—to transfer to social science the interest once felt in physical; and how strong is the stimulus thus applied to sociologists to emulate the diligence and success of the physicists and biologists, their predecessors. Nor have diligence, enthusiasm, or scientific genius been wanting to them. As has already been observed, they have transformed social science altogether by applying to it the doctrines of evolution which physical science taught them, and have thus organically affiliated the former study to the latter. This is in itself a triumph worthy of the enterprise that has achieved it. But they have done far more than borrow from physics this mere general theory. They have established between physical phenomena and social an enormous number of analogies, so close that the one set assists in the interpretation of the other. They have borrowed from the physicists a number of their subsidiary theories, their methods of grouping facts, and, above {10} all, their methods of studying them. In a word, they are endeavouring to follow the masters of physical science along the precise path which has led the latter to such solid and such definite results.