678 SOCIAL SCIENCE 



attaches to vested rights and vested interests. It has created a 

 psychical disposition favorable to the idea of progress. At the same 

 time, by disclosing the slow and gradual nature of all beneficent 

 changes, it has impressed the necessity of caution and patience in the 

 attempt to promote progress. 



Social science has largely contributed to what may be called col- 

 lective self-knowledge, and self-knowledge is as much a necessary 

 precedent condition of improvement in the case of society as in the 

 case of individuals. It has traced helpful if not perfect analogies 

 between individual development and certain stages in the past de- 

 velopment of the human race, and has also shown the survival of 

 the more primitive types of civilization in certain strata of contem- 

 porary society. It is thus calculated to throw some light on the 

 causes that bring about the conflict of ethical standards in modern 

 societies, and to furnish us with hints as to the method by which 

 the conflict may be diminished. It further contributes to social 

 self-knowledge by such investigations as the study of the psychology 

 of crowds, and it can make additional and important contributions in 

 the same direction by careful descriptions of the chief types of human 

 temperament and of race character, as objectified in literature, art, 

 law, religion, etc. 



Social science creates a disposition favorable to patient progress; 

 it contributes to social self-knowledge. It also assists in the prac- 

 tical work of human betterment by giving definite expression, in its 

 statistical averages, to the connection between great social evils 

 and the conditions external and internal (the two can never be 

 wholly separated) to which they are due, thereby greatly enhancing 

 the social impulse to remove such evils. The connection between 

 death-rate and social class, between intemperance and irregularity 

 of employment, are examples in point. 



Finally, the social end being given, the ethical formula being 

 supplied from elsewhere, social science has its most important func- 

 tion to discharge in filling in the formula with a richer content, and, 

 by a more comprehensive survey and study of the means that lead 

 to the end, to give to the ethical imperatives a concreteness and 

 definiteness of meaning which otherwise they could not possess. 

 Thus ethical rule may enjoin upon us to promote the health of our 

 fellow men, but so long as the laws of hygiene remain unknown or 

 ignored, the practical rules which we are to adopt in reference to 

 health will be scanty and ineffectual. The new knowledge of 

 hygiene which social science supplies will enrich our moral code in 

 this particular. Certain things which we freely did before, we now 

 know we may not do; certain things which we omitted to do, we 

 now know we ought to do. If a connection between intemperance 

 and irregularity of employment is traced, in this particular too, the 



