It is probable, moreover, that the obscuration of this question of ends has been helped by the modern acceptance of the doctrine of progress. This in its turn appears to be mainly due to the application of the principle of evolution to human affairs. We have supposed that because living nature shows a process of development, the life of man is also necessarily governed by a law of predestined progress, from worse to better, from the simple to the more complex. The result of this evolutionary view of human affairs has been to make the study of ends appear impertinent. The ends are already determined; why then trouble ourselves about them? It is true that we do not know whither this _vis a tergo_ is propelling us; the only thing we can do, therefore, is to study the processes by which it works as we see them in operation in men’s minds, whether the single or the mass mind. We shall observe them, duly record them, and contemplate them in a spirit of detachment, without concerning ourselves overmuch with their destination. But it is now too late in the day to suppose that this attitude can be seriously maintained. The area of the margin of human freedom may be a subject of controversy; but it is impossible to take seriously the kind of determinism which denies the possibility of directing human action to deliberately chosen ends. The actual range of our control over our actions may be limited; but within those limits it is very real. And in any case it does not require to be very much to make the evolution hypothesis of very doubtful validity as an interpretation of the whole life of man.[7] Footnote 7: For a concise statement of the philosophical argument against a doctrine of progress based upon biological evolution, see Bertrand Russell, _Mysticism and Logic_, pp. 105, 106. Sociology must concern itself with ends; and it must do so at its own beginnings. If this means that it has to forfeit its claim to a strictly scientific status, so be it. There is no virtue in replying that the question of ends is an affair of speculation and hypothesis. That is indeed true; but it cannot be helped. We are compelled to speculate concerning ends since there is no other way of reaching a conception of them. And there is no harm in speculation so long as it starts from the soundest available premises, and its conclusions are not hardened into dogma. Sociology will hardly rise above an academic futility until it abandons its obsession to rank as a pure science and makes bold to define however tentatively the goal toward which social processes should be directed. Let it by all means make its surveys and collate its statistics unremittingly; but these things it ought to do and not to leave the other undone. II