We have now, however, to record a singular and disappointing truth. Though men of science have, in the manner just described, been engaged for years in the field of sociological study; though the way was prepared for them by men like Comte, Mill, and Buckle; though amongst them have been men like Mr. Spencer, with capacities of the highest order, and though certain results have been reached of the kind desired, complaints are heard from thinkers of all shades of opinion that these results are singularly unsatisfactory and inconclusive when compared with the efforts that have been made in reaching them, and still more when compared with the results of corresponding efforts in the sphere of physics.
No one complains more loudly of this comparative failure than some of the most distinguished students of social science themselves. Professor Marshall, for instance, who has done more than any other English author to breathe into technical economics the spirit of evolutionary science, admits that Comte, who laid the foundation of sociology, and Mr. Spencer, who has invested it with a definitely scientific character, have brought to the study of “man’s actions in society unsurpassed knowledge and great genius, and have made epochs in thought by their broad surveys and suggestive hints”; but neither of them, he proceeds to say, has succeeded {11} in doing more than this. Mr. Kidd, again, whose work on Social Evolution, if not valuable for the conclusions he himself desires to substantiate, is curiously significant as an example of contemporary sociological reasoning, repeats Professor Marshall’s complaint, and gives yet more definite point to it. Having observed that “despite the great advance which science has made in almost every other direction, there is, it must be confessed, no science of human society, properly so called,” he justifies this observation by insisting on what is an undoubted fact, that “so little practical light has even Mr. Herbert Spencer succeeded in throwing on the nature of the social problems of our time, that his investigations and conclusions are, according as they are dealt with by one side or the other, held to lead up to the opinions of the two diametrically opposite camps of individualists and collectivists, into which society is rapidly becoming organised.”
Now what is the reason of this? Here is the question that confronts us. That the methods adopted by the scientist in the domain of physics are applicable to social phenomena, just as they are to physical, has been not only established in a broad and general way, but demonstrated by a mass of minute and elaborately co-ordinated facts. Why, then, when we find them in the sphere of physics solving one problem after another with a truly surprising accuracy, do they yield us such vague and often contradictory results when we apply them to the solution of the practical problems of society? {12}
Those who complain so justly of the failure of social science and who yet show themselves altogether at a loss to account for it, might have seen their way to answering this question had they concentrated their attention on a point that was just now alluded to. It was just now observed that the problems which social science aims at answering, and is popularly expected to answer, are of two distinct kinds—the philosophic or religious, and the practical; the former being concerned with the destinies of humanity as a whole, with movements extending over enormous periods of time, and with the remote past and future far more than with the present; the other being concerned exclusively with the present or the near future, and with changes that will affect either ourselves or our own children.
Now it will be found that social science, whilst busying itself with both these sets of problems, has met with the failures which are alleged against it, only in dealing with the latter, and that, so far as regards the former, it has successfully reached conclusions comparable in precision and solidity to those of the physicists and biologists whose methods it has so conscientiously followed. Professor Marshall’s own treatise on The Principles of Economics, and that of Mr. Kidd on Social Evolution likewise, abound in admissions that this statement of the case is correct. Professor Marshall’s account of the rise and fall of civilisation as caused by climate, by geographical position, and the influence of one race and one civilisation on another,—an account of which he {13} places in the very forefront of his elaborate work—is professedly merely a summary of conclusions already arrived at; and the manner in which he states these conclusions is itself evidence that sociologists, when dealing with certain classes of social phenomena, have given us something more than “surveys” and “suggestive hints.” Social science, in fact, cannot be properly called a failure except when it ceases to deal with the larger phenomena of society, which show themselves only in the long course of ages, and descending to the problems of a particular age and civilisation, endeavours to deduce, from the general principles it has established, propositions minute enough to be applicable to our immediate conduct and expectations. As practical inquirers, therefore, the real question before us is not why social science has failed, where physical science has succeeded, but why social science has succeeded like physical science in one direction, and, unlike physical science, failed so signally in another. If we concentrate our attention on the subject in this way, and thus realise with precision the nature of the failure we desire to explain, we shall find that the explanation of it is not only far simpler than might have been supposed, but also that the remedy for it is far more obvious and more easy.
It has been said that sociology has succeeded in dealing with those social phenomena which extend themselves through vast periods of time, and has failed in dealing with those whose interest and {14} existence is limited to lives of a few particular generations. Now between these two sets of phenomena, as thus far described, the most obvious difference is, no doubt, the difference in their magnitude. This difference, however, is altogether accidental, and does nothing to explain those curiously contrasted results which the study of one set and the other has yielded to the modern sociologist. The difference, which will explain these, is of quite another kind, and may briefly be stated thus. The larger social phenomena—those which interest the speculative philosopher, and with which sociology has dealt successfully, are phenomena of social aggregates, or masses of men regarded as single bodies; the smaller phenomena—those which interest the practical man, and with which sociology has dealt unsuccessfully—are essentially the phenomena not of social aggregates, but of various parts of aggregates.
Let us illustrate the matter provisionally by two rudimentary examples. As an example of the larger phenomena let us take the advance of man from the age of stone to the ages of bronze and iron. Of the smaller, we may take the phenomena referred to by Mr. Kidd—namely, the appearance in the modern world of the socialist or collectivist party, and the antagonism between it and the party of private property and individualism. Now the first of these two sets of phenomena—the use by men of stone implements, and the subsequent use of metal implements—consist of phenomena which, so far as the {15} sociologist is concerned, are manifested successively by humanity, or some portion of humanity, as a whole. They are not referred to individuals or small classes. No question is asked as to what particular savage may rightly claim priority in the invention of metal implements, or whether flint or bronze were the subjects of any prehistoric monopoly. Those races amongst which the use of the metals became general are regarded as a single body, which had made this advance collectively. They are, indeed, as we shall again have occasion to observe, habitually described under the common name of Man. But let us turn to such phenomena as the antagonism between individualists and collectivists, and the case is wholly different. It is true that here also, as in the case we have just been considering, our attention is called to a portion of the human race, namely, the Western or progressive nations, which we may, for certain purposes, regard as a single aggregate; but it is fixed, not on the phenomena which this aggregate exhibits as a whole, but on those exhibited by unlike and conflicting parts of it—the part which sympathises with individualists on the one hand, and the part which sympathises with collectivists on the other.
Thus the subject-matter of sociology, regarded as a speculative science, consists of those points in which the members of any given social aggregate resemble one another. The subject-matter of sociology, regarded as a practical science, consists of those points in which the members, or {16} certain groups of members, of any given social aggregate differ from one another. And here we come to the reason why sociology, as a practical science, has failed. It has failed because hitherto it has not realised this distinction, and has persisted in applying to the phenomena, involved in practical social problems, the same terminology, the same methods of observation and reasoning, which it has applied to the phenomena involved in speculative social problems. By so doing, though it has dissipated many popular errors, it has, in the most singular manner, given a new vitality to others. It has indeed supplied a pseudo-scientific sanction to the most abject fallacies that have vitiated the political philosophy of this century; and it has thus been instrumental in keeping alive and encouraging the most grotesquely impossible hopes as to what may be accomplished by legislation, and the most grotesquely false views as to the sources of social and political power. To expose these fallacies, and the defective reasoning on which they rest, is the object of the present volume.
The nature of that peculiarity in the procedure of modern sociology which has just been described, and to which all its errors are due, forms a very curious study, and it will be essential to exhibit it with the utmost plainness possible. In the following chapter, therefore, the reader shall be presented with examples of it.