It would be, of course, possible to dispute whether the word “science” should convey this quality of certitude; but to most people it certainly does at the present time.  So far as the movements of comets and electric trams go, there is, no doubt, practically cocksure science; and indisputably Comte and Herbert Spencer believed that cocksure could be extended to every conceivable finite thing.  The fact that Herbert Spencer called a certain doctrine Individualism reflects nothing on the non-individualising quality of his primary assumptions and of his mental texture.  He believed that individuality (heterogeneity) was and is an evolutionary product from an original homogeneity.  It seems to me that the general usage is entirely for the limitation of the use of the word “science” to knowledge and the search after knowledge of a high degree of precision.  And not simply the general usage:  “Science is measurement,” Science is “organised common sense,” proud, in fact, of its essential error, scornful of any metaphysical analysis of its terms.

If we quite boldly face the fact that hard positive methods are less and less successful just in proportion as our “ologies” deal with larger and less numerous individuals; if we admit that we become less “scientific” as we ascend the scale of the sciences, and that we do and must change our method, then, it is humbly submitted we shall be in a much better position to consider the question of “approaching” sociology.  We shall realise that all this talk of the organisation of sociology, as though presently the sociologist would be going about the world with the authority of a sanitary engineer, is and will remain nonsense.

In one respect we shall still be in accordance with the Positivist map of the field of human knowledge; with us as with that, sociology stands at the extreme end of the scale from the molecular sciences.  In these latter there is an infinitude of units; in sociology, as Comte perceived, there is only one unit.  It is true that Herbert Spencer, in order to get classification somehow, did, as Professor Durkheim has pointed out, separate human society into societies, and made believe they competed one with another and died and reproduced just like animals, and that economists, following List, have for the purposes of fiscal controversy discovered economic types; but this is a transparent device, and one is surprised to find thoughtful and reputable writers off their guard against such bad analogy.  But, indeed, it is impossible to isolate complete communities of men, or to trace any but rude general resemblances between group and group.  These alleged units have as much individuality as pieces of cloud; they come, they go, they fuse and separate.  And we are forced to conclude that not only is the method of observation, experiment, and verification left far away down the scale, but that the method of classification under types, which has served so useful a purpose in the middle group of