d not developed
these social growths or offered a mature ground to those social
parasites which make us sometimes despair of being able to get much
insight into the London of the present.

The fact seems to be that Prof. Geddes conceives sociology too much as a
primary and too little as a secondary science. He defines applied
sociology as the application of social survey to social science, when
social ratiocination or social philosophy are needed before one can be
said to have gauged the extent of the influence which this comprehensive
science may have in our actual practice or on our Budget of the future.
No doubt, "observation, so far from excluding interpretation, is just
the very means of preparing for it," but this preparation must be made
in the various specialisms which make up the complete or encyclopaedic
science of sociology. To me it seems an unwarrantable narrowing of the
scope or significance of sociology to say that there is no better method
available of teaching it "than that of regional survey, historical as
well as geographical." Surely "regional survey" Is the appropriate
method in the very simplest and most concrete parts of the complete
science of sociology, and even when we come to history proper we must do
very much more than make a regional survey. It is very interesting, no
doubt, to "survey" history in the course of a summer ramble to the ruins
of some old monastery, but unless the monks had kept records of what had
been done there in bygone days, the mere outward survey will not carry
us further than Prof. Geddes is carried in the very general map which he
makes of the whole field of history. In other words, history, in any
proper sense, demands more than "survey" in Prof. Geddes' sense of the
word. It calls to its aid linguistics, criticism, archaeology,
jurisprudence, and politics--there must be comparison and criticism as
well as "survey." History is the laboratory in which the sociologist
sees his social experiments working out their [Page: 133] results, and
history is to the sociologist what experiment is to the physician, or
the comparative method to the biologist.

This being so, the scope of "civics" as "applied sociology" is immensely
widened. The present is the child of the past, but we see that it is
only in the present that such ancient groups as the colony of Hanseatic
merchants in Old London have shown us what has been the ultimate
significance of their embryological life. The mo