uth itself, that the socialists of to-day have been here drawing their
inspiration.

The confusion in question arises from a failure to see that sociology is
concerned with two distinct sets of phenomena, or with one set regarded
from two absolutely distinct standpoints. Thus it is constantly said
that man, in the course of ages, has developed civilised societies and
the various arts of life--that, beginning as an animal only a little
higher than the monkey, he gradually became a builder of cities, a
master of the secrets of nature, a philosopher, a poet, a painter of
divine pictures. And from a certain point of view this language is
adequate. If what we desire to do is to estimate, as speculative
philosophers, the significance of the human race in relation to the
universe or its Author, by considering its origin on this planet, and
its subsequent fortunes hitherto, what interests us is man in the mass,
or societies, and not individuals. But if we are interested in any
problem of practical life--such, for example, as how to cure cancer, or
cut a navigable canal through a broad and mountainous isthmus, or
decorate a public building with a series of great frescoes--the central
point of interest is the individual and not society. How would a mother,
whose child was hovering between life and death, be comforted by the
information that man was a great physician? How would America be helped
in the construction of the Panama Canal by learning from sociologists
that man could remove mountains? How could great pictures be secured for
a public building by information to the effect that the greatest of all
great artists depended for their exceptional power on the aggregate of
conditions surrounding them, when ten millions of men whose surrounding
conditions were similar might be tried in succession without one being
found who rose in art above the level of vulgar mediocrity? It is not
that the generalisations of the evolutionary sociologists with regard
to man in the mass, or societies, are untrue philosophically.
Philosophically they are of the utmost moment. It is that they have no
bearing on the problems of contemporary life, and that they miss out the
one factor by which they are brought into connection with it.

Let us take, for example, the way in which Herbert Spencer illustrates
the general theorem of the evolutionary sociologists by the case of
Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's debt to his times. "Given a Shakespeare,"
he s