chemistry, physiology; physiology, sociology; and so forth.  His actual method was altogether unscientific; but through all his work runs the assumption that in contrast with his predecessors he is really being as exact and universally valid as mathematics.  To Herbert Spencer—­very appropriately since his mental characteristics make him the English parallel to Comte—­we owe the naturalisation of the word in English.  His mind being of greater calibre than Comte’s, the subject acquired in his hands a far more progressive character.  Herbert Spencer was less unfamiliar with natural history than with any other branch of practical scientific work; and it was natural he should turn to it for precedents in sociological research.  His mind was invaded by the idea of classification, by memories of specimens and museums; and he initiated that accumulation of desiccated anthropological anecdotes that still figures importantly in current sociological work.  On the lines he initiated sociological investigation, what there is of it, still tends to go.

From these two sources mainly the work of contemporary sociologists derives.  But there persists about it a curious discursiveness that reflects upon the power and value of the initial impetus.  Mr. V.V.  Branford, the able secretary of the Sociological Society, recently attempted a useful work in a classification of the methods of what he calls “approach,” a word that seems to me eminently judicious and expressive.  A review of the first volume the Sociological Society has produced brings home the aptness of this image of exploratory operations, of experiments in “taking a line.”  The names of Dr. Beattie Crozier and Mr. Benjamin Kidd recall works that impress one as large-scale sketches of a proposed science rather than concrete beginnings and achievements.  The search for an arrangement, a “method,” continues as though they were not.  The desperate resort to the analogical method of Commenius is confessed by Dr. Steinmetz, who talks of social morphology, physiology, pathology, and so forth.  There is also a less initiative disposition in the Vicomte Combes de Lestrade and in the work of Professor Giddings.  In other directions sociological work is apt to lose its general reference altogether, to lapse towards some department of activity not primarily sociological at all.  Examples of this are the works of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb, M. Ostrogorski and M. Gustave le Bon.  From a contemplation of all this diversity Professor Durkheim emerges, demanding a “synthetic science,” “certain synthetic conceptions”—­and Professor Karl Pearson endorses the demand—­to fuse all these various activities into something that will live and grow.  What is it that tangles this question so curiously that there is not only a failure to arrive at a conclusion, but a failure to join issue?

Well, there is a certain not too clearly recognised order in the sciences to which I wish to call your attention, and which forms the gist of my case against this scientific pretension.  There is a gradation in the importance of the instance as one passes from mechanics and physics and chemistry through the biological sciences to economics and sociology, a gradation whose correlatives and implications have not yet received adequate recognition, and which do profoundly affect the method of study and research in each science.