If this contention is sound, if therefore we boldly set aside Comte and Spencer altogether, as pseudo-scientific interlopers rather than the authoritative parents of sociology, we shall have to substitute for the classifications of the social sciences an inquiry into the chief literary forms that subserve sociological purposes.  Of these there are two, one invariably recognised as valuable and one which, I think, under the matter-of-fact scientific obsession, is altogether underrated and neglected The first, which is the social side of history, makes up the bulk of valid sociological work at the present time.  Of history there is the purely descriptive part, the detailed account of past or contemporary social conditions, or of the sequence of such conditions; and, in addition, there is the sort of historical literature that seeks to elucidate and impose general interpretations upon the complex of occurrences and institutions, to establish broad historical generalisations, to eliminate the mass of irrelevant incident, to present some great period of history, or all history, in the light of one dramatic sequence, or as one process.  This Dr. Beattie Crozier, for example, attempts in his “History of Intellectual Development.”  Equally comprehensive is Buckle’s “History of Civilisation.”  Lecky’s “History of European Morals,” during the onset of Christianity again, is essentially sociology.  Numerous works—­Atkinson’s “Primal Law,” and Andrew Lang’s “Social Origins,” for example—­may be considered, as it were, to be fragments to the same purport.  In the great design of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” or Carlyle’s “French Revolution,” you have a greater insistence upon the dramatic and picturesque elements in history, but in other respects an altogether kindred endeavour to impose upon the vast confusions of the past a scheme of interpretation, valuable just to the extent of its literary value, of the success with which the discrepant masses have been fused and cast into the shape the insight of the writer has determined.  The writing of great history is entirely analogous to fine portraiture, in which fact is indeed material, but material entirely subordinate to vision.

One main branch of the work of a Sociological Society therefore should surely be to accept and render acceptable, to provide understanding, criticism, and stimulus for such literary activities as restore the dead bones of the past to a living participation in our lives.

But it is in the second and at present neglected direction that I believe the predominant attack upon the problem implied by the word “sociology” must lie; the attack that must be finally driven home.  There is no such thing in sociology as dispassionately considering what is, without considering what is intended to be.  In sociology, beyond any possibility of evasion, ideas are facts.  The history of civilisation is really the history of the appearance and reappearance,