then, though not without their value, are far from being properly scientific. What remains? There is, shall we say, no science of sociology--merely a heap of vague, empirical observations, too flimsy to be useful in strict logical inference? I should, I confess, be apt to say so myself. Then, you may proceed, is it not idle to attempt to introduce a scientific method? And to that I should emphatically reply, No! it is of the highest importance. The question, then, will follow, how I can maintain these two positions at once. And to that I make, in the first place, this general answer: Sociology is still of necessity a very vague body of approximate truths. We have not the data necessary for obtaining anything like precise laws. A mathematician can tell you precisely what he means when he speaks of bodies moving under the influence of an attraction which varies inversely as the square of the distance. But what are the attractive forces which hold together the body politic? They are a number of human passions, which even the acutest psychologists are as yet quite unable to analyse or to classify: they act according to laws of which we have hardly the vaguest inkling; and, even if we possessed any definite laws, the facts to which they have to be applied are so amazingly complex as to defy any attempt at assigning results. There is, so far as I can see, no ground for supposing that there is or ever can be a body of precise truths at all capable of comparison with the exact sciences. But this obvious truth, though it implies very narrow limits to our hopes of scientific results, does not force us to renounce the application of scientific method. The difficulty applies in some degree even to physiology as compared with physics, as the vital phenomena are incomparably more complex than those with which we have to deal in the simpler sciences; and yet nobody doubts that a scientific physiology is a possibility, and, to some extent, a reality. Now, in sociology, however imperfect it may be, we may still apply the same methods which have been so fruitful in other departments of thought. We may undertake it in the scientific spirit which depends upon patient appeal to observation, and be guided by the constant recollection that we are dealing with an organism, the various relations of whose constituent parts are determined by certain laws to which we may, perhaps, make some approximation. We may do so, although their mutual actions and reactions are so complex and subtle that we can never hope to disentangle them with any approach to completeness. And one test of the legitimacy of our methods will be, that although we do not hope to reach any precise and definitely assignable law, we yet reach, or aim at reaching, results which, while wanting in precision, want precision alone to be capable of incorporation in an ideal science such as might actually exist for a supernatural observer of incomparably superior powers.