CHAPTER XIV. 



SUGGESTIONS OF SOCIOLOGY.* 



SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY. 



SOCIOLOGY, though still a very young science, is 

 past the stage of being scoffingly dismissed as " a 

 mass of facts about society." It proposes to give 

 a scientific account of social life as a concrete unity, 

 whose constituents have their significance from their 

 relations to the whole. It proposes to do this by 

 analytic and historical investigation. 



Aristotle looked upon man as " by nature a politi- 

 cal animal," and Darwin agreed with him in suppos- 

 ing that man was born a social being. That this is 

 usually true now is certain; to suppose that it was 

 so originally seems gratuitous. It is easy to refer 

 to the fact that man is derived from a characteris- 

 tically gregarious stock, but the apes nearest man do 

 not live in societies; it is easy to assert that in his 

 primitive weakness man could not have survived in 

 a Robinson Crusoe condition, even with a mate to 

 help him, but we know of many savages who get 

 along fairly well with nothing beyond domestic or- 

 ganisation. 



But by some means or other, probably along vari- 

 ous paths, man became definitely social, and evolved 



* The aim of this chapter is to indicate some of the lines 

 which are now being followed in sociological inquiry. 



