And what of the method by which social work is to be conducted. Is it, as the tentative definition said, suggested by the social sciences? There is not a great deal of explicit reference to social science, but the concepts of economics, social psychology and sociology are constantly in evidence and even political science has its say in an “engineering” conception of the state, in definitions of democracy and in criteria of progress. The almost complete disappearance of the question of relative responsibility of the individual and society which morality and philosophy have debated in so many forms testifies to assimilation of the sociological concept of social life as an integration of individual lives rather than an aggregation and of the individual life as no digit but an incident “* * * time moves swiftly in the social field and the special knowledge of today easily becomes the common knowledge of tomorrow.”[54] And after all that has been said in the preceding pages of the obvious effects of a scientific method and scientific attitude in making social work what the conference shows it to be it scarcely remains to prove or even argue the confirmation, the reinforcement, the expansion of the last qualification of social work. Nine round-table conferences and five committee reports, in addition to the papers presenting concrete programs and reports of local experiments testify to the careful checking up of method. The constant references to programs, standards and experience, to records and the search for causes, the emphasis on prevention and the patient, objective, therapeutic attitude of the social worker all testify to the conquest of the field by science. But the completeness and significance of that conquest are plainest in the ever-present, implicit but unmistakable assumption that all the undertakings discussed are parts of a systematically coordinated campaign based upon continuing observation of cause and effect. Thus have the reports of the conference confirmed and filled out the tentative definition. But the analysis did not cull from them any fresh characteristics of social work. Their mass of commentary, aimed, as it seemed, in all possible directions, would suggest no testimony except in answer to leading questions and we will have to be satisfied with such expansion of the definition as, while adding no new terms, commits the already proposed items to more significant implications. The definition so expanded must be passed on, for challenge or alteration by the evidence of the training schools. FOOTNOTES: [32] The 1920 conference heard from four judges (three of them of juvenile courts), three college professors and one college president, a bishop, a rabbi, a governor, and a state commander of the American Legion, as well as from doctors and other professional people who occupied positions ranking as social work. [33] Conference, 1919, pp. 111, 123, 133, 136. [34] Ibid. 1920, pp. 271 and 278.