32 
THE PRINCIPLES OF SOCIOLOGY. 
Feb., 1890. 
In this objection there is some force—but its force is 
almost wholly neutralised by the consideration that we are 
allowed to use our organ only as throwing light upon modes 
of thought and life which actually exist or which can be 
proved to have existed. If we proceeded farther, and took 
our own reconstruction of the world (in thought) as repre¬ 
senting an actual construction by primitive man, we should 
grossly err, and put ourselves at once outside the boundaries 
of science. It is by the comparison of our ideal primitive man 
with the real savage that we may hope to arrive at sound 
conclusions. From the savage we may learn that many 
things which we thought primitive are really acquired ; by 
our inner touchstone we may distinguish the real nucleus of 
his character and his ideas from the growths which have 
overlaid and almost hidden it. His sophistications are 
unlike our sophistications, and the two brought into contact 
will neutralise each other, and will thus rectify the two sets 
of errors which threatened to destroy our science at its very 
birth. 
We have, then, to study (1) humanity in its barest elements, 
(2) its varying environments, and (3) to trace, by inductive 
research and deductive reasoning, the gradual development 
of humanity by its own inner forces, and by stimulus from 
without. 
The bare elements of humanity prove not only man’s 
capacity for the social state, but, so to speak, his innate 
sociality. For when we look at these elements we find that 
they are distinctively social just so far as they are dis¬ 
tinctively human. Every individual man implies or pre¬ 
supposes society by the very foundations of his being. It is a 
truism to say that there could be no society were there no 
individuals, and that, as the individuals are, the society must 
be. But it is equally true, if not yet a truism, to say that 
there could be no really human individuals were there no 
society, and that man is literally unthinkable except as a 
social creature. Just consider what we should have to strip 
away from our conception of the human character if we tried 
to imagine a man perfectly isolated from his kind, both in 
retrospect and prospect—not only living apart from human 
society, like Alexander Selkirk, but never having known it at 
all—utterly alone, and made for solitude. 
In the first place we must strip away every emotion except 
brute fear, brute rage, and brute pleasure in food and warmth. 
All the higher emotions—all the emotions distinctively 
human—refer directly or indirectly to the fellow-creatures 
with whom we have intercourse. Affection, sympathy, pride, 
