26 
THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY. 
Feb., 1891 . 
his blood the penalty of mistake and failure. Among the 
favourite platform platitudes of modern Socialists are the 
claim for man of “ natural rights,” and the sentiment that 
many people have no share in the blessings of our civilisa¬ 
tion. Every living person—the poorest, the lowest, the most 
degraded—shares an inheritance of knowledge, doctrines, and 
ideas, which long ages have gathered as the fruits of civilisation. 
The “ natural ” rights of man are to struggle and to endure ; 
but our own great inheritance of established rights is the 
harvest of long ages of successful experiments. The living 
gather the fruit of seed sown by the dead, and feed their hope 
and faith by a knowledge of how great was the chaos from 
which their order sprang, and how infinite must be the 
possibilities still latent in humanity. The great moral gain 
from the study of Sociology is the perception of by what 
prodigious struggles, not only our material good, but “ gentle¬ 
ness, virtue, wisdom, and endurance” have been gained—the 
knowledge that always “ what shall be betters what has been 
and is ; ” that the unceasing tendency of the ages is towards 
the final perfection of all things. We find our only revelation 
of God, or the Great First Cause, in the thought of man ; 
and the revelation is more divine and beautiful than our old 
dreams had told us— 
“ The end of it is love, 
The heart of it is peace and consummation sweet.” 
We pass with evolution from the arid realm of orthodox 
theology and breathe an “ ampler ether, a diviner air.” 
The conduct of primitive man was in part determined by 
the feelings with which he regarded the living men around 
him, and in part by the feelings with which he regarded men 
who had passed away. Incomprehensible power is the 
fruitful parent of fear: the fear of the living became the root 
of the political control ; the fear of the dead, the root of 
the religious control; and these, with kindred secondary 
developments, have resulted in the tangled web of human 
society as we now know it. 
In considering our data for the study of Sociology we 
have necessarily included much of Sociology itself, since in 
no case can the data of a science be stated before some 
knowledge of the science has been reached. What are the 
phenomena included within the scope of Sociology ? 
The development of the family has first to be con¬ 
sidered, since this is the primitive society. The associa¬ 
tion of man and woman, of parent and child, originallv for 
the satisfaction of purely physical wants, has developed into 
