EVOLUTION AND SOCIOLOGY. 45 



waits for meantime is what every science has had to 

 wait for, exhaustive observation of the facts and ways 

 of Nature. Geology stood still for centuries waiting 

 for those who would simply look at the facts. Men 

 speculated in fantastic ways as to how the world 

 could have been made, and the last thing that oc- 

 curred to them was to go and see it making. Then 

 came the observers, men who, waiving all theories of 

 the process, addressed themselves to the natural 

 world direct, and in watching its daily programme of 

 falling rain and running stream laid bare the secret 

 for all time. Sociology has had its Werners ; it awaits 

 its Huttons. The method of Sociology must be the 

 method of all the natural sciences. It also must go 

 and see the world making, not where the conditions are 

 already abnormal beyond recall, or where Man, by 

 irregular action, has already obscured everything but 

 the conditions of failure; but in lower Nature which 

 makes no mistakes, and in those fairer reaches of a 

 higher world where the quality and the stability of 

 the progress are guarantees that the eternal order of 

 Nature has had her uncorruptecl way. 



It cannot be that the full programme for the perfect 

 world lies in the imperfect part. Nor can it ever be 

 that science can find the end in the beginning, get 

 moral out of non-moral states, evolve human societies 

 from ant-heaps, or philanthropies from protoplasm. 

 But in every beginning we get a beginning of an end ; 

 in every process a key to the single step to be taken 

 next. The full corn is not in the ear, but the first cell 

 of it is, and though " it doth not yet appear " what 

 the million-celled ear shall be, there is rational ground 

 for judging what the second cell shall be. The next 



