THE HUMAN SCIENCES 41 



cannot be explained by biology. Biology leaves it out of 

 account. "Acting, living society," says Professor Bosan- 

 quet, "is an infinitely higher thing than a steam-engine, 

 plant, or animal ; and the best of our ideas are not too 

 good to be employed in analysing it." Society is the 

 product of self -consciousness, in fact, and we must employ 

 the idea of self-consciousness as a category in order to 

 explain it. Man, man as rational, is the only key to the 

 nature of society. 



Now, I believe that the attempt to explain man in the 

 light of the physical, the biological, or any other category 

 than self-consciousness, is the main reason for the unsatis- 

 factory condition of the sciences of man I mean of 

 Psychology, Logic, Ethics, Sociology, and so forth and 

 is the chief cause of the confusion in Metaphysics and 

 Theology. This is why these sciences are infected with 

 insoluble problems which have brought discredit upon 

 them, prevented them from partaking in the sure advance 

 of the physical sciences, and even rendered suspect the 

 validity of all human knowledge. 



The importance of the matter demands that we should 

 dwell upon it and illustrate further this metaphorical use 

 of conceptions, before coming to the social problems with 

 which we are most directly concerned. There is no lesson 

 which the student of human nature must be so careful to 

 learn as this of detecting and guarding himself against 

 the unconscious use of metaphors. And he may learn this 

 lesson from the history of any one of the human sciences. 

 Logic, for instance, has long endeavoured to explain such 

 ordinary processes of thought as judgment and reasoning 

 by means of mechanical categories. But, in their light, 

 it was not possible to account for the unity in difference 



