And to such a conclusion the principles of modern evolutionary sociology, as unanimously interpreted by the philosophers of the nineteenth century, may be fairly said to lend the entire weight of their prestige. Let us, then, consider more carefully what these principles are, with a view to understanding the true scope of their significance. We shall find that, although undoubtedly true in themselves, the scope of their significance has been very imperfectly understood by the great thinkers to whose talents their elucidation has been due; that these thinkers, in their eagerness to establish a new truth, have at the same time introduced a new confusion; and that it is from the confusion of a truth with a falsehood, rather than from the truth itself, that the socialists of to-day have been here drawing their inspiration.
The confusion in question arises from a failure to see that sociology is concerned with two distinct sets of phenomena, or with one set regarded from two absolutely distinct standpoints. Thus it is constantly said that man, in the course of ages, has developed civilised societies and the various arts of life—that, beginning as an animal only a little higher than the monkey, he gradually became a builder of cities, a master of the secrets of nature, a philosopher, a poet, a painter of divine pictures. And from a certain point of view this language is adequate. If what we desire to do is to estimate, as speculative philosophers, the significance of the human race in relation to the universe or its Author, by considering its origin on this planet, and its subsequent fortunes hitherto, what interests us is man in the mass, or societies, and not individuals. But if we are interested in any problem of practical life—such, for example, as how to cure cancer, or cut a navigable canal through a broad and mountainous isthmus, or decorate a public building with a series of great frescoes—the central point of interest is the individual and not society. How would a mother, whose child was hovering between life and death, be comforted by the information that man was a great physician? How would America be helped in the construction of the Panama Canal by learning from sociologists that man could remove mountains? How could great pictures be secured for a public building by information to the effect that the greatest of all great artists depended for their exceptional power on the aggregate of conditions surrounding them, when ten millions of men whose surrounding conditions were similar might be tried in succession without one being found who rose in art above the level of vulgar mediocrity? It is not that the generalisations of the evolutionary sociologists with regard to man in the mass, or societies, are untrue philosophically. Philosophically they are of the utmost moment. It is that they have no bearing on the problems of contemporary life, and that they miss out the one factor by which they are brought into connection with it.