58 INTRODUCTION" 



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 occurred to them was to go and see 

 It making. Then came the observers, men who, 

 waiving all theories of the process, addressed them- 

 selves 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 ab- 

 normal 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 uncorrupted 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 be- 

 ginning, get moral out of non-moral states, evolve 

 human societies from ant-heaps, or philanthropies 

 from protoplasm. But in every beginning we get 



