sociology. Numerous works--Atkinson's "Primal Law," and Andrew Lang's
"Social Origins," for example--may be considered, as it were, to be
fragments to the same purport. In the great design of Gibbon's "Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire," or Carlyle's "French Revolution," you
have a greater insistence upon the dramatic and picturesque elements in
history, but in other respects an altogether kindred endeavour to impose
upon the vast confusions of the past a scheme of interpretation,
valuable just to the extent of its literary value, of the success with
which the discrepant masses have been fused and cast into the shape the
insight of the writer has determined. The writing of great history is
entirely analogous to fine portraiture, in which fact is indeed
material, but material entirely subordinate to vision.

One main branch of the work of a Sociological Society therefore should
surely be to accept and render acceptable, to provide understanding,
criticism, and stimulus for such literary activities as restore the dead
bones of the past to a living participation in our lives.

But it is in the second and at present neglected direction that I
believe the predominant attack upon the problem implied by the word
"sociology" must lie; the attack that must be finally driven home. There
is no such thing in sociology as dispassionately considering what _is_,
without considering what is _intended to be_. In sociology, beyond any
possibility of evasion, ideas are facts. The history of civilisation is
really the history of the appearance and reappearance, the tentatives
and hesitations and alterations, the manifestations and reflections in
this mind and that, of a very complex, imperfect elusive idea, the
Social Idea. It is that idea struggling to exist and realise itself in
a world of egotisms, animalisms, and brute matter. Now, I submit it is
not only a legitimate form of approach, but altogether the most