BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1301 



science of sociology. How this has differentiated from biology pure 

 and simple is of course an inquiry only to be outlined within our 

 limits here. Yet its separation from biology, its differentiating and 

 distinctive character as a further and yet more complex science, has 

 to be broadly defined ; alike for clearness' sake and as defence against 

 those undue claims, not only of adequate understanding, but 

 even of mastery, and legislative if not even despotic rule, to which 

 even biologists have been of late years inclined. And these not 

 merely ultra-Darwinian, even to militancy, in war-time; but 

 sometimes the most socially-minded and well-meaning of them — 

 even some of our contemporary eugenists for example. 



What, then, is this main differential character which separates 

 and distinguishes sociology from biology? — and so defends it from 

 excessive pretensions of biologists, though admitting their just 

 claims, and accepting their contributions to the full? This distinc- 

 tiveness of sociology for humanity lies in its essential concern with 

 the Social Heritage of civilisation ; something apart from and beyond 

 that Organic Heredity of man which is in the province of the biologist 

 of man as animal, i.e. as of given species and variety, race and 

 sub-variety, parentage and family connections, in short of Breed. 

 Socially important though the unravelling of all this field of heredity 

 and organic relationship has been, is, and must increasingly become, 

 even the study of heredity towards the practical realisation of good 

 and better breeding in humanity — ^needed and hopeful though this 

 be — has been, is, and remains essentially, a development of biology 

 in science; and necessarily fundamentally akin to agricultural 

 stock-breeding applied in practice. But the eugenist tends to claim 

 all this not only as sociological, but even sometimes as the very 

 crux of all social questions. That the sociologist welcomes this 

 contribution is evident; thus Galton's classic papers on Eugenics 

 are justly reckoned by the Sociological Society as probably the most 

 significant and certainly the most influential of their whole publica- 

 tions ; and they are gratified, as well as sometimes a little regretful, 

 that the Eugenic Society soon thereafter hived off from them as a 

 separate swarm. Yet what was the reason for this separation of these 

 active students of human heredity and breed? Primarily their 

 recognition of the definiteness and urgency and importance of their 

 problem, and the vastness of its field; with need of concentration 

 of experts accordingly, and for discussions and publications alike. 

 Between the general biologists on one hand and the general socio- 

 logists on the other, they needed a clear field, that of the full exten- 

 sion of biology as fundamentally underlying the study of social life. 

 Recall other fundamentals of sociology, and and of other sciences 

 too. The arithmetical, graphic and further mathematical skill, 

 ably applied to the study of social phenomena, as by Quetelet and 

 his successors, has opened for us the vast field of statistics, as from 



