consciousness_ entails a reaction of the
whole assemblage of social phenomena upon themselves, such as the
natural sciences have no example of." And he concludes: "Sociology
ought, therefore, to guard carefully against the tendency to crystallise
that which is essentially fluid and moving, the tendency to consider as
given fact or dead data that which creates itself and gives itself into
the world of phenomena continually by force of its own ideal
conception." These opinions do, in their various keys, sound a similar
_motif_ to mine. If, indeed, the tendency of these remarks is
justifiable, then unavoidably the subjective element, which is beauty,
must coalesce with the objective, which is truth; and sociology mast be
neither art simply, nor science in the narrow meaning of the word at
all, but knowledge rendered imaginatively, and with an element of
personality that is to say, in the highest sense of the term,
literature.

If this contention is sound, if therefore we boldly set aside Comte and
Spencer altogether, as pseudo-scientific interlopers rather than the
authoritative parents of sociology, we shall have to substitute for the
classifications of the social sciences an inquiry into the chief
literary forms that subserve sociological purposes. Of these there are
two, one invariably recognised as valuable and one which, I think, under
the matter-of-fact scientific obsession, is altogether underrated and
neglected The first, which is the social side of history, makes up the
bulk of valid sociological work at the present time. Of history there is
the purely descriptive part, the detailed account of past or
contemporary social conditions, or of the sequence of such conditions;
and, in addition, there is the sort of historical literature that seeks
to elucidate and impose general interpretations upon the complex of
occurrences and institutions, to establish broad historical
generalisations, to eliminate the mass of irrelevant incident, to
present some great period of history, or all history, in the light of
one dramatic sequence, or as one process. This Dr. Beattie Crozier, for
example, attempts in his "History of Intellectual Development." Equally
comprehensive is Buckle's "History of Civilisation." Lecky's "History of
European Morals," during the onset of Christianity again, is essentially
sociology. Numerous works--Atkinson's "Primal Law," and Andrew Lang's
"Social Origins," for example--may be considered, as it were,