sociologists are constantly falling; and to which must be largely
ascribed the prevalent distaste for sociology so general in this
would-be practical-minded community in which we find ourselves, as
indeed also the comparative unattractiveness of our studies to the body
of specialist scientific workers, not even excepting those within what
we consider sociological fields.

The history of each science, be it mathematics or astronomy, botany,
zoology or geology, shows us that it is not enough to have the
intelligent observer, or even the interpretative thinker with his
personally expressed doctrine. This must be clearly crystallised into a
definite statement, method, proposition, "law" or theory, stated in
colourless impersonal form before it is capable of acceptance and
incorporation into the general body of science. But while astronomer and
geologist and naturalist can and do describe both the observational
results and their general conceptions in literary form, requiring from
the ordinary reader but the patience to master a few unfamiliar terms
and ideas, they also carry on their work by help of definite and orderly
technical methods, descriptive and comparative, analytic and synthetic.
These, as far as possible, have to be crystallised beyond their mere
verbal statement into formulae, into tabular and graphic presentments,
and thus not only acquire greater clearness of statement, but become
more and more active agencies of inquiry--in fact, become literal
_thinking-machines_. But while the mathematician has his notations and
his calculus, the geographer and geologist their maps, reliefs and
sections, the naturalist his orderly classificatory methods, it has been
the misfortune and delay of political economy, and no small cause of
that "notorious discord and sterility" with which Comte reproached it,
that [Page: 67] its cultivators have so commonly sought to dispense with
the employment of any definite scientific notations; while even its