OF SOCIETY. 533 



changes depend. The extreme rigidity of Kant's cate- 

 gorical imperative has been abandoned, giving rise to a 

 tendency in the direction of indefiniteness in moral 

 theory and leading inevitably — as it seems to many — 

 to laxity in practice. Before dealing more fully with 

 this important ethical tendency of modern sociology, it 

 may be useful to summarise in a few words what the 

 Nineteenth Century has, so far as we have seen, ac- 

 complished in dealing with the social problem. 



And first, we may note that this has been treated 69. 



Scientific 



in two distinct interests. The one is purely scientific, andpracu- 



■^ cal interests. 



taking this term not in the sense in which it has been 

 used in this country and in France, but in the wider 

 sense prevalent in Germany, where it denotes investiga- 

 tions by any suitable method of any phenomenon with the 

 sole object of ascertaining its nature. The other interest 

 is practical, the object being to gain a basis for social 

 reform ; and this, either in the more limited sense of 

 improving the laws and customs of an existing order 

 of things — such was, in the main, the aim of the older 

 school of English social and political philosophers — 

 or with the more ambitious object of a fundamental 

 reorganisation of the whole fabric of human society. 

 With these two interests in view, placing either the 

 one or the other in the foreground, we have three 

 tolerably distinct sociological theories. 



The first is that view which places the idea of 70. 



Three socio- 



humanity in the foreground, conceiving this as an logical 



•^ o ' o theories. 



intellectual and spiritual principle which lies at the 

 foundation of culture and civilisation, permeating and 

 gradually transforming the natural and cruder forms of 



