Sociology of Comte. 463 



Rhtturic. The latler has been abandoned by Science. The former 

 has gradually regained concreteness, and now traces the economic 

 thread, not, as it may be imagined, apart from the actual conditions 

 O' life, but as it winds in and out through the moving and organised 

 labyrinth of human nature. It has thus attained valuable results, 

 and gained a generally recognised position. Sociology will never 

 progress unless, consciously or unconsciously, it adopts a similar 

 procedure. It is true that Comte and some other sociologists have 

 taken a different line, and have attempted to ascertain the laws of 

 human association by making an abstract of history in general. 

 We shall see whether this path of investigation repays the sociolo- 

 gist on anything like the scale on which it undoubtedly repays the 

 philosopher and the historian. Meanwhile we note the objection 

 and reassert the thesis. It is also true that really somid achievements 

 have re.sulted from psychological investigations into social elements 

 of the individual and of aggregations of men. But. if this is an 

 exception, it is one which proves the rule, since the procedure 

 adopted is undoubtedly of the abstract kind which we suggest, and 

 which is common to all science; that is, a particular class of 

 phenomena is abstracted from the complex of experience and 

 .studied in isolation. At the .same time, while admitting the value 

 of such studies as increasing our knowledge of the phenomenology 

 of the subject, we must also notice that, since the abstract social 

 instinct does not of itself .suffice to form the dominant motive of life, 

 it caji never be used as the key to the whole labyrinth. To examine 

 the phenomenology of the abstract social instinct is useful ; to ask 

 what would hai>pen if men were dominated by it would be foolish. 

 Science asks many hypothetical questions, but it does not ask a 

 hypothetical question about practical life when the hypothesis is 

 known to be untrue. As a matter of fact, such advances as have 

 been made in sociology have all been in the way of examining ques- 

 tions suggested by the practical exigencies of life; and, therefore, 

 since men are to a great extent actuated by the crudest utilitarianism, 

 sociology owes much to utilitarian theorists, who trace the not 

 imaginar}- path of actual motives and fasten on the questions which 

 are thrown up before them. But there is still something unsatis- 

 f acton" about such a procedure; for it is attended by a sense of 

 waste of time and effort. If such utilitarianism is meant to describe 

 the actual motives of men its truth is limited, since many men ajid 

 women are actuated by higher motives, and the world described is 

 not therefore the actual world. Nor is there anything else to recom- 

 mend the selection of this particular instinct of selfishness, since 

 science can never be a mere pander. Apart, therefore, from the 

 service rendered by suggesting an actual motive, utilitarianism is of 

 no sen'ice to sociology. 



Now, sociology deals immediately with human action, that is, 

 with the phenomena of the will, conscious or unconscious, and the 

 will is claimed in its entirety as regards practice by conscience, and 

 as regards theory by Ethics. There is, therefore, a quest-on which 

 .sociolog)- must ask sooner or later, namely, the question of the right 



