In the approach to the social question through an analysis of the natural rights of the individual, the seventeenth and eighteenth social writers fell into a deductive and a priori procedure which led them far astray. Like the theory of individual rights, the correlative doctrine of the social contract contained more error than truth. The method of positivism, ordinarily connected with the writings of Comte, essayed a scientific approach to the social question. It insisted upon accuracy, induction, and a right emphasis upon sequence and co-existence. But positivism, even in the hands of its exponents, became deductive and philosophic. It promised well scientifically, but fell into nearly all the errors which it condemned. It was, however, a factor in producing the nineteenth century humanitarianism. The organic analogy method of studying human society attracted widespread attention, appealed strongly to the imagination even of scholars, but resulted in findings of negligible value. The parallelisms between an organism and society proved to be scientifically valueless, except as they revealed some of the connections between organic volution and social evolution. They created a considerable vocabulary of bio-social terminology which has been more of a hindrance than a help in social thinking. The psychical approach to the study of societary life, introduced by Lester F. Ward, and made scientific by the findings of inductive and behavioristic psychology, has proved thus far to be the best method of understanding the social process and of arriving at a statement of sociological laws. This method has revealed human life as a series of social conflicts and co-operations, and of forms of social control designed to regulate individuals for selfish and unselfish group purposes. An explanation of the more important phases of the psychical methodology has been presented in several chapters of this volume. The individual rights doctrine, the social contract theories, the concept of positivism, and the organic analogies belong to the unscientific age in sociological methodology. In the main these sets of social theories were philosophic, deductive, a priori, and argumentative. They were based chiefly on opinions, positivism alone leaning to observation and induction but failing to live up to its promises. On the other hand, recent decades have been marked by the rise of scientific methods in sociology, attention has been centered on the social process, and particularly on the psychical processes of which the social process is an elaboration. Although he possessed an entirely inadequate knowledge of psychology, Lester F. Ward laid the foundations of modern sociology when he insisted that society is a psychical affair, capable of mastering itself. As a result of this contribution to method, not by a psychologist but by a paleontologist, social thought moved forward into the field of scientific sociology.