662 SOCIAL SCIENCE 



this subject, and a large corps of scholars, all following out the orig- 

 inal suggestion of the father of the Positive Philosophy. 



" On the other hand, there was another step equally inevitable. 

 Just because this new science dealt strictly with human things, 

 the conviction arose that it should be harnessed into service; that the 

 discoveries which these men made should also be put into practice 

 or applied for the future regulation of human society. On this very 

 afternoon, as we know, there will be two separate departments of 

 sociology holding sessions, one of them dealing with the science as 

 such and the other with it on the ' regulative ' side. 



" As the twentieth century opens, we see, therefore, that sociology 

 is already breaking up into a number of subordinate sciences. In all 

 probability there will be no further extensive treatises published 

 dealing with this science as a whole. The field is too great and each 

 of the special departments too important. Men will now begin to 

 devote their whole lives to the separate study of one domain within 

 the larger field, as we can observe in glancing down over the 'sec- 

 tions ' which are to meet on the ensuing days. 



" But still further. The conviction is growing, after three quarters 

 of a century of research, that we are dealing here with spiritual 

 problems far more than with problems of biology. While we accept 

 the fact once for all that the human race in its associated life fur- 

 nishes the material for an actual science, we are also coming to 

 believe that the laws and the phenomena here have a peculiar char- 

 acter which should perhaps put them upon a separate plane. It is 

 men on the spiritual side who are to be studied, and whose associa- 

 tions are to be regulated through the discoveries and the laws of 

 sociology. In the ' regulative ' aspect we are on the border-line 

 between this science and that of ethics. In discussing ' social regu- 

 lation ' we are dealing with the problems of good and evil, how the 

 evil may be repressed and how the good may be fostered in society 

 as a whole. We are to consider how we may put to practical use all 

 that is being found out or is yet to be disclosed in the sphere of the 

 larger science of sociology. In a word, we are concerned to discover 

 not only how social institutions have been regulated in the past, but 

 also how we may guide them in a given direction for the future. 

 Our problems here are of a special kind, and it is the great depart- 

 ment of applied ethics to which they belong. From this aspect our 

 chief interest lies in the reconstruction of human society. At this 

 point the man of science must also become the reformer." 



