44 INTRODUCTION. 



some men have mistaken his pawns for kings ; others 

 have mistaken the real kings for pawns ; every ism 

 has found endorsement in his pages, and men have 

 gathered courage for projects as hostile to his whole 

 philosophy as to social order. Theories of progress 

 have arisen without any knowledge of its laws, and 

 the ordered course of things has been done violence to 

 by experiments which, unless the infinite conserva- 

 tism of Nature had neutralized their evils, had been 

 a worse disaster than they are. This inadequacy, in- 

 deed, of modern sociology to meet the practical prob- 

 lems of our time, has become a by- word. Mr. Leslie 

 Stephen pronounces the existing science " a heap of 

 vague empirical observation, too flimsy to be useful " ; 

 and Mr. Huxley, exasperated with the condition in 

 which it leaves the human family, prays that if 

 " there is no hope of a large improvement " he should 

 "hail the advent of some kindly comet which would 

 sweep the whole affair away." 



The first step in the reconstruction of Sociology will 

 be to escape from the shadow of Darwinism — or rather 

 to complement the Darwinian formula of the Struggle 

 for Life by a second factor which will turn its dark- 

 ness into light. A new morphology can only come 

 from a new physiology, and vice versa; and for both 

 we must return to Nature. The one-sided induction 

 has led Sociology into a wilderness of empiricism, and 

 only a complete induction can reinstate it among the 

 sciences. The vacant place is there awaiting it ; and 

 every earnest mind is prepared to welcome it, not only 

 as the coming science, but as the crowning Science of 

 all the sciences, the Science, indeed, for which it will 

 one day be seen every other science exists. What it 



