It begins to look as though the social scientist working with his regular habits is actually a dialectician without a dialectical basis. His dilemma is that he can neither use his terms with the simple directness of the natural scientist pointing to physical factors, nor with the assurance of a philosopher who has some source for their meaning in the system from which he begins his deduction. Or, the social scientist is trying to characterize the world positively in terms which can be made good only dialectically. He can never make them good dialectically as long as he is by theory entirely committed to empiricism. This explains why to the ordinary beholder there seem to be so many smuggled assumptions in the literature of social science. It will explain, moreover, why so much of its expression is characterized by diffuseness and by that verbosity which is certain to afflict a dialectic without a metaphysic or an ontology. This uncertainty of the social scientist about the nature of his datum often leads him to treat empirical situations as if they carried moral sanction, and then to turn around and treat some point of contemporary mores—which is by definition a “moral” question—as if it had only empirical aspects. In direct consequence, when the social scientist should be writing “positively,” like a crack newspaper reporter, one finds him writing like Hegel, and, when the stage of his exposition might warrant his writing more or less like Hegel, one finds him employing dialectical terms as if they had positive designations. Paradoxically, his very reverence for facts may tend to make him sound like Hegel or some other master of categorical thinking. Anyone sampling the literature of social science cannot fail to be impressed with the proportion of space given to definition. Indeed, one of the most convincing claims of the science is that our present-day knowledge of man is defective because our definitions are simplistic. His behavior is much more varied than the unscientific suppose; and therefore a central objective of social study is definition, which will take this variety into account and supplant our present “prejudiced” definitions. With this in mind, the social scientist toils in library or office to prepare the best definitions he can of human nature, of society, and of psychosocial environment.