Lester F. Ward, whose theories we shall now examine, warns us against the erroneous supposition “formerly quite prevalent,” that “science consists in the discovery of facts.” He maintains that “there is not a single science of which this is true, and a much more nearly correct definition would be that science consists in reasoning about facts.” We may recall here that learned body which sneered at Darwin as “a mere theorizer” and conferred its honors upon an unknown man who had collected some facts about butterflies but had carefully avoided “reasoning about them.” Of course the value of this reasoning is that it leads to the discovery of those laws or generalizations which reveal the relation of the facts to each other, and thus enables us to appreciate their real significance. Therefore we might venture to push the matter a little further and define science as the discovery of laws. But for the uniformity and invariability of physical phenomena, astronomy would be impossible. The discovery of evolution laid the foundations of modern biology. Dalton’s theory of atoms and Lavoisier’s permanence of matter emancipated chemistry from the superstitions of alchemy. Ward is therefore on solid ground when he maintains that “the indispensable foundation of all economic and social science” consists in the fact that “all human activities and all social phenomena are rigidly subject to natural law.” It is just the difficulty of discerning uniform laws amidst the highly complex phenomena of society that delays the proper development of sociology, although, as we have seen, this difficulty is materially augmented by the class interests at stake. Again, just as biology was hindered in its growth by the doctrine of special creations and, still earlier, Copernican astronomy was checked by the geocentric theory, so now the progress of sociology is restrained by the doctrine of divine providence. Believers in divine providence are well represented by the Hindoo who in his lesson on English composition spoke of his father as having “died according to the caprice of God which passeth all understanding.” It is precisely because “caprice” can not be understood and cannot therefore, be made the basis of prevision, that it can not be admitted into the domain of science. Science, as Starcke well said, is founded on “faith in the universality of causation.” If the activities of men and the policies of nations are not ruled by cause and effect a science of society is impossible. And yet, contends Ward, it was the very adoption of this “altogether sound abstract principle” that “led to the greatest and most fundamental of all economic errors, an error which has found its way into the heart of modern scientific philosophy, widely influencing public opinion, and offering a stubborn resistance to all efforts to dislodge it.”