vi. “And so the whirligig of Time brings about his revenges.” French Sociology to-day is a psychological science, though its founder banished psychology from his sociological method. Nothing is more instructive than to watch the gradual pressure of the various points of view which are emphasised by the various departments of social experience, as they reveal, under criticism, their tendency to complete themselves and one another by suggesting the only category which is adequate to them as a whole. As every serious student of social matters knows by his own experience, it is impossible to touch a physical fact, or a statistical datum, or a legal enactment, in reference to its social bearing, without its at once, so to speak, coming alive in his hands, and attaching itself to an underlying relation of mind as the only unity which will make it intelligible, and correlate it with other experiences, by themselves no less fragmentary. In statistics, for example, you touch a moving creature, as if through the holes in a wall, at this point and the other, and write down where you have touched him. [1] But to see the creature as he is, and combine your information of all kinds in a just and complete idea, you {43} must get him into the open. And that, when the question is of a life, you can only do by reconstructing his mind, for even to see a social unit with your eyes gives you a fragment only, and not a whole. On Fridays, we are told, the passenger traffic returns of French railways, omnibuses, and steamers show a decline. [2] What dumb fact is this? People do not like to travel on Fridays, or prefer to travel upon other days. What is this preference? The only unity that can really afford an explanation, that can correlate this irregular fragment of fact with the whole to which it belongs, is the living mind and will of the society in which the phenomenon occurs. Explanation aims at referring things to a whole; and there is no true whole but mind. Necessarily, therefore, with widening experience and deepening criticism, mind has become the centre of the experiences focussed by sociology. [1] Cf. _Aspects of the Social Problem_ (Macmillan, 1895), C.S. Loch on “Returns in Social Science,” p. 287. [2] Tarde, _Les Lois de l’Imitation_, p. 115.