This makes social work hard to compare with the established professions with the ministrations of which its services have many points in common, with medicine for example. Although several sciences are helpful to social work it specializes in the application of no one of them. It is only in the very loosest sense applied sociology and might with almost equal suggestiveness be called applied eugenics or social psychology or any one of half a dozen other things. Conversely its observations and experiences are valuable to a dozen arts and sciences but build no science of their own. Nor does it build any systematically cumulative body of principles exclusively for its own use, as does the law. This is no disgrace to social work, which may be equally respectable with the well established professions and yet quite _sui generis_. But it operates in indirect ways as a handicap. It is a familiar observation that any new science, any new departure in human knowledge must use the vocabulary already available and so can only receive its first formulation in terms of things that have gone before. The failure of social work to produce any compact body of doctrine pertaining to its range of undertakings has kept it long in the stage of analogy and tutelage. It evidently feels a temptation to shape itself after the fashion of the best respected types of human activity instead of simply envisaging its own objects as clearly as possible and enlisting every available means to attain them. Its essential inability to develop any compact body of doctrine may also be handicapping it in a more fundamental way. It is said that social work does not get its proportionate share of the best students taking professional training. May not this be because a course which offers an acquaintance with the high lights of half a dozen subjects and mastery of none is not likely to recommend itself to able students as promising to lead to dignified and responsible work? Social work can only hope that when more time and more ability have gone into the development of its separate fields such discipline may be developed along special lines as will give it better intellectual status and the power to attract and hold recruits by something beside that appeal to their imagination or their humanity exerted by its general possibilities. “I treat philanthropy seriously,” wrote one of its historians, “because of what it implies; its professors have commonly not been very efficacious.”[79] But scientific social work is something more than philanthropy and its history is yet to be made.