however that it was necessary to distinguish as he did not, between the material of social philosophy and the processes of collecting it on the one hand, and the various stages of interpretation on the other. So important was this discrimination that it seemed to me expedient to call it by a distinguishing name. The conceptions of method which I adopted were accordingly the following: Starting with the presumption, first, that the sciences of man's environment are at our service; second, that the sciences dealing with man the individual are kept within call for the help which they must render in explaining the constitution of the social elements, we pass into the territory of the social sciences when we cease to contemplate man as an individual, related merely by the genetic bond to his immediate progenitors and descendants; and when we begin to study men in associations distinguished generically by the phenomena of active or passive agreement. In other words, there are phenomena subsequent to and arising from the characteristics of individual men, viz., the phenomena of the accommodation of volition to volition in every form of human contact. These phenomena are the proper subject matter of a societary science or of a family of sciences dealing with facts peculiar to societies. The enlarging consensus of scholars is tending to employ the name sociology as a general designation of societary science so defined.
The first step in the procedure of any species of societary science, i. e., of sociology, in its most general form or in its particular divisions, must be an observing and a descriptive process, which we may treat as one. The appropriate description is always understood to be as really an integral portion of science as any subsequent process of discrimination, classification or interpretation. Thus in the article just quoted. Professor Le Conte says of the evolutionary hypothesis, after having shown that as a vague philosophic idea it is very old:
Again the scientific mind was awakened from its sense of security by the appearance in 1859 of Darwin's Origin of Species. This time, as we all know, the theory was almost immediately and universally accepted. The reason of this great difference in its reception now,
