relationships. It is a science of human aggregations, of all
possible family groupings, of neighbours and neighbourhood, of
companies, associations, unions, secret and public societies,
religious groupings, of common ends and intercourse, and of the
methods of intercourse and collective decision that hold human
groups together, and finally of government and the State. The
elucidation of economic relationships, depending as it does on the
nature of the hypothesis of human aggregation actually in operation
at any time, is considered to be subordinate and subsequent to this
general science of Sociology. Political economy and economics, in
our world now, consist of a hopeless muddle of social assumptions
and preposterous psychology, and a few geographical and physical
generalisations. Its ingredients will be classified out and widely
separated in Utopian thought. On the one hand there will be the
study of physical economies, ending in the descriptive treatment of
society as an organisation for the conversion of all the available
energy in nature to the material ends of mankind--a physical
sociology which will be already at such a stage of practical
development as to be giving the world this token coinage
representing energy--and on the other there will be the study of
economic problems as problems in the division of labour, having
regard to a social organisation whose main ends are reproduction and
education in an atmosphere of personal freedom. Each of these
inquiries, working unencumbered by the other, will be continually
contributing fresh valid conclusions for the use of the practical
administrator.

In no region of intellectual activity will our hypothesis of freedom
from tradition be of more value in devising a Utopia than here. From
its beginning the earthly study of economics has been infertile and