The reader will not find much difficulty in understanding that if sociologists persist in reasoning thus, they are hardly likely to arrive at any conclusion sufficiently definite to guide us in the practical difficulties of life. It may be urged, however, that such language as we have been considering, though used by scientific writers, is intended itself to be rhetorical rather than scientific, or that it betrays the inaccuracy of this or that individual thinker, instead of arising from a fundamental error in method. If any one thinks this, he shall soon be disabused of his opinion. The reader shall now be presented with a brief summary of the method deliberately followed, and of some of the conclusions arrived at by that distinguished thinker who has done more than any one else to impart to sociology the character which it at present possesses; and the error which lies at the bottom of the reasoning we have been just considering shall there be exhibited, systematically exemplified, and explicitly and elaborately defended. It is perhaps {25} hardly necessary to say that the thinker thus referred to is Mr. Herbert Spencer. We will then follow Mr. Spencer’s reasoning from the beginning, as set forth in his works; and before consulting his monumental _Principles of Sociology_ we will turn to his _Study of Sociology_, a smaller and preparatory treatise, in which the methods adopted by him in his main inquiry are explained. He opens this treatise with declaring that until recent years any scientific treatment of social phenomena was impossible; and it was impossible, he says, for two definite reasons. These were the prevalence of two utterly false theories, both of which precluded the idea that anything like law or order of a calculable kind were prevalent in the social sphere. One of these theories was “_the theocratic theory_,” the other what he calls “_the great-man theory_.” The theocratic theory is that which explains all social change by reference to the direct and arbitrary interference of a Deity; and if this be adopted, Mr. Spencer has no difficulty in showing that anything like a social science must be necessarily looked on as impossible: for the only thread by which social phenomena are connected will in that case be hidden in the will of an inscrutable Being, which may indeed be made known to us by revelation, but which is not susceptible of being either observed or calculated. This theory, however, in its cruder form, at all events, is, says Mr. Spencer, being fast discarded by everybody—even by the theologically {26} orthodox; and the really important foe which social science has to fight against is the great-man theory, not the theocratic. Accordingly, it is by a criticism of the great-man theory that he introduces us to the theory of society, which is in his estimation true, and which alone presents social phenomena to us as amenable to scientific treatment.