and Taine, are but the most prominent; witness the works of
geographers like Humboldt, Ritter, Reclus, or of developmental
technologists like Boucher de Perthes and regional economists like Le
Play. The main lines of a concrete and evolutionary sociology (or at
[Page: 66] least _sociography_) have thus been laid down for us; but the
task now before us, in our time, in such a society as this--and indeed
in such a paper as the present one--its that of extracting from all this
general teaching its essential scientific method, one everywhere latent
and implicit, but nowhere fully explicit, or at least adequately
systematised.

It is in fact only as we can agree upon some definite and orderly method
of description that our existing literature of social surveys can be
adequately compared or new ones co-operatively undertaken. Hence the
importance of discussions of scientific method such as those who have so
largely occupied our first volume. Yet, I submit, here lies the means of
escaping from these too abstract (and consequently too static)
presentments of the general methodology of social science into which
sociologists are constantly falling; and to which must be largely
ascribed the prevalent distaste for sociology so general in this
would-be practical-minded community in which we find ourselves, as
indeed also the comparative unattractiveness of our studies to the body
of specialist scientific workers, not even excepting those within what
we consider sociological fields.

The history of each science, be it mathematics or astronomy, botany,
zoology or geology, shows us that it is not enough to have the
intelligent observer, or even the interpretative thinker with his
personally expressed doctrine. This must be clearly crystallised into a
definite statement, method, proposition, "law" or theory, stated in
colourless impersonal form before it is capable of acceptance and
incorporation into the general body of science. But while astronomer and
geologist and naturalist can and do describe both the observational
results and their general conceptions in literary form, requiring from
the ordinary reader but the patience to master a few unfamiliar terms
and ideas, they also carry on their work by help of definite and orderly
technical methods, descriptive and comparative, analytic and synthetic.
These, as far as possible, have to be crystallised beyond their mere
verbal statement into formulae, into tabular and graphic presentmen