subjects, the subjects involving numerous but a finite number of units, has also to be abandoned here.  We cannot put Humanity into a museum, or dry it for examination; our one single still living specimen is all history, all anthropology, and the fluctuating world of men.  There is no satisfactory means of dividing it, and nothing else in the real world with which to compare it.  We have only the remotest ideas of its “life-cycle” and a few relics of its origin and dreams of its destiny ...

Sociology, it is evident, is, upon any hypothesis, no less than the attempt to bring that vast, complex, unique Being, its subject, into clear, true relations with the individual intelligence.  Now, since individual intelligences are individual, and each is a little differently placed in regard to the subject under consideration, since the personal angle of vision is much wider towards humanity than towards the circumambient horizon of matter, it should be manifest that no sociology of universal compulsion, of anything approaching the general validity of the physical sciences, is ever to be hoped for—­at least upon the metaphysical assumptions of this paper.  With that conceded, we may go on to consider the more hopeful ways in which that great Being may be presented in a comprehensible manner.  Essentially this presentation must involve an element of self-expression must partake quite as much of the nature of art as of science.  One finds in the first conference of the Sociological Society, Professor Stein, speaking, indeed a very different philosophical dialect from mine, but coming to the same practical conclusion in the matter, and Mr. Osman Newland counting “evolving ideals for the future” as part of the sociologist’s work.  Mr. Alfred Fouillee also moves very interestingly in the region of this same idea; he concedes an essential difference between sociology and all other sciences in the fact of a “certain kind of liberty belonging to society in the exercise of its higher functions.”  He says further:  “If this view be correct, it will not do for us to follow in the steps of Comte and Spencer, and transfer, bodily and ready-made, the conceptions and the methods of the natural sciences into the science of society.  For here the fact of consciousness entails a reaction of the whole assemblage of social phenomena upon themselves, such as the natural sciences have no example of.”  And he concludes:  “Sociology ought, therefore, to guard carefully against the tendency to crystallise that which is essentially fluid and moving, the tendency to consider as given fact or dead data that which creates itself and gives itself into the world of phenomena continually by force of its own ideal conception.”  These opinions do, in their various keys, sound a similar motif to mine.  If, indeed, the tendency of these remarks is justifiable, then unavoidably the subjective element, which is beauty, must coalesce with the objective, which is truth; and sociology mast be neither art simply, nor science in the narrow meaning of the word at all, but knowledge rendered imaginatively, and with an element of personality that is to say, in the highest sense of the term, literature.