But Comte and Spencer, with most other biologically-minded sociologists have been more at home among biological generalisations and theories than among the facts they arise from, and hence it is ever needful to maintain and extend a first-hand contact with these.  I seek, therefore, to press home the idea that just as the biologist must earn his generalisations through direct and first-hand acquaintance with nature, so now must the sociologist work for his generalisations through a period of kindred observation and analysis, both geographic and historical; his “general laws” thus appearing anew as the abstract of regional facts, after due comparison of these as between region and region.

May not much of the comparative sterility of post-Comtean (or at any rate post-Spencerian) sociology, which is so commonly reproached to us, and to which the difficult formation and slow growth of sociological societies and schools is largely due, be thus explained?  Is it not the case that many able and persuasive writers, not only knowing the results, but logically using the generalisations of Comte or Spencer, as of old of Smith or now-a-days of List in the economic field, are yet comparatively sterile of fresh contributions to thought, and still more to action?  In fact, must we not apply to much of the literature of recent sociology, just as to traditional economics, the criticism of Comte’s well-known law of three states, and inquire if such writers, while apparently upon the plane of generalised science, are not really in large measure at least arrested upon Comte’s “metaphysical stage,” Mill’s “abstractional” one?

Conversely, the revival of sociological interest in this country at present is obviously very largely derived from fresh and freshening work like that of Mr Francis Galton and of the Right Hon. Charles Booth especially.  For here in Mr. Galton’s biometrics and eugenics is a return to nature, a keen scrutiny of human beings, which is really an orderly fruition of that of the same author’s “Art of Travel.”  Similarly, Mr. Booth’s “Survey of London” is as truly a return to nature as was Darwin’s Voyage, or his yet more far-reaching studies in his garden and farmyard at home. [Page:  59] Is it not the main support of the subtle theorisings and far-stretched polemic of Prof.  Weismann that he can plague his adversaries with the small but literal and concrete mice and hydroids and water fleas with which his theories began?  And is it not for a certain lack of such concrete matter of observation that the vast systematisations of M. de Greef, or M. de Roberty, or the original and ingenious readings of Prof.  Simon Patten leave us too often unconvinced, even if not sometimes without sufficiently definite understanding of their meaning?  The simplest of naturalists must feel that Comte or Spencer, despite the frequently able use of the generalisations of biology, themselves somewhat lacked the first-hand observation of the city and community around them,