Those who complain so justly of the failure of social science and who yet show themselves altogether at a loss to account for it, might have seen their way to answering this question had they concentrated their attention on a point that was just now alluded to. It was just now observed that the problems which social science aims at answering, and is popularly expected to answer, are of two distinct kinds—the philosophic or religious, and the practical; the former being concerned with the destinies of humanity as a whole, with movements extending over enormous periods of time, and with the remote past and future far more than with the present; the other being concerned exclusively with the present or the near future, and with changes that will affect either ourselves or our own children. Now it will be found that social science, whilst busying itself with both these sets of problems, has met with the failures which are alleged against it, only in dealing with the latter, and that, so far as regards the former, it has successfully reached conclusions comparable in precision and solidity to those of the physicists and biologists whose methods it has so conscientiously followed. Professor Marshall’s own treatise on _The Principles of Economics_, and that of Mr. Kidd on _Social Evolution_ likewise, abound in admissions that this statement of the case is correct. Professor Marshall’s account of the rise and fall of civilisation as caused by climate, by geographical position, and the influence of one race and one civilisation on another,—an account of which he {13} places in the very forefront of his elaborate work—is professedly merely a summary of conclusions already arrived at; and the manner in which he states these conclusions is itself evidence that sociologists, when dealing with certain classes of social phenomena, have given us something more than “_surveys_” and “_suggestive hints_.” Social science, in fact, cannot be properly called a failure except when it ceases to deal with the larger phenomena of society, which show themselves only in the long course of ages, and descending to the problems of a particular age and civilisation, endeavours to deduce, from the general principles it has established, propositions minute enough to be applicable to our immediate conduct and expectations. As practical inquirers, therefore, the real question before us is not why social science has failed, where physical science has succeeded, but why social science has succeeded like physical science in one direction, and, unlike physical science, failed so signally in another. If we concentrate our attention on the subject in this way, and thus realise with precision the nature of the failure we desire to explain, we shall find that the explanation of it is not only far simpler than might have been supposed, but also that the remedy for it is far more obvious and more easy.