odically undertaken hereafter. Analytic and microscopic scholarship is abortive without the complementary work of the synthetic scholar who builds minute details into comprehensive structures. The conditions of human association are so involved that it is no longer pardonable to increase present popular sensitiveness and irritation by theorizing about plans for accelerating the rate of human improvement, unless we have reduced all available pertinent facts about past and present human associations to generalized knowledge, which shall indicate both direction and means of improvement.
This new task of scholarship is coming into recognition in every part of the world where thought is unfettered. Scholars are everywhere speaking out their dissatisfaction with fragmentary knowledge of society, and their ambition to contribute to knowledge that shall be properly dynamic. Mr. Benjamin Kidd’s recent account of the state of the social sciences in England is a fair index of the condition against which there is everywhere edifying revolt. We quote him at length because the case is not materially different elsewhere. Mr. Kidd says:
When I set out to write Social Evolution, I was impressed, as I am sure many an earnest student of our social phenomena has been impressed before me, with the extraordinary contrast which the sciences that deal with man in society present, when compared with the practical and experimental sciences upon which they rest. I need not speak of the strength and vigor of the latter, and of the new life that has come to many of them with the knowledge of the last fifty years. All this is only as it should be. It is the contrast which is so striking. I am bound to say that this impression with which I set out has deepened and grown down to the present hour. What seems to come home to the observer is the conviction, however much he may for the time try to avoid it, that outside a small group of workers, who however stand more or less aloof from the main body of professional thought, we have really in England at the present day no school of thought producing men fitted to deal with the science of human society as a whole. It would be impertinent in me to make such a remark if it implied any intention to speak disparagingly of the learning displayed, and of the zealous and painstaking work being per-
