Psychology was, then, until recent years the science of the abstract individual mind. Each worker aimed at rendering by the aid of introspection an analytic description of the stream of his own consciousness, a consistent classification of the elements or features that he seemed to discover therein, and some general laws or rules of the order of succession and conjunction of these features; postulating in addition some one or more explanatory principles or active agencies such as ‘the will’ or the desire of pleasure, the aversion from pain, or ‘the association of ideas,’ to enable him to account for the flow of the distinguishable elements of consciousness. The psychology achieved by these studies, necessary and valuable as they were, was of little help to men who were struggling with the concrete problems of human life and was therefore largely ignored by them. But, as I have pointed out in the Introduction to my _Social Psychology_, those who approached these problems were generally stimulated to do so by their interest in questions of right and wrong, in questions of norms and standards of conduct, the urgency of which demanded immediate answers for the practical guidance of human life in all its spheres of activity, for the shaping of laws, institutions, governments, and associations of every kind; or, as frequently perhaps, for the justification and defence of standards of conduct, modes of belief, and forms of institution, which men had learnt to esteem as supremely good. Thus the political science of Hobbes was the expression of his attempt to justify the monarchy established by the Tudors and endangered by the failings of the Stuart kings; while that of Locke was equally the outcome of his desire to justify the revolution of 1668. Hobbes felt it worth while to preface his _magnum opus_ on political philosophy with a fanciful sketch of human nature and of primitive society; yet, as Mr Gooch remarks, “neither Hobbes nor his contemporaries knew anything of the actual life of primitive communities[2].” And it may be added that they knew as little of the foundations of human nature. Again, the social doctrines of Rousseau, with all their false psychology, were formulated in order to stir men to revolt against the conditions of social life then prevalent in Europe. In a similar way, in the development of all that body of social doctrine that went under the name of Utilitarianism and which culminated in the political science and economy of the Manchester School, every step was prompted by the desire to find theoretical guidance or justification for rules governing human activity. And, if we go back to the _Politics_ of Aristotle, we find the normative or regulative aim still more prominent.