he _City of God_.

During the period when ancient ways were giving place to modern, and a
transition was taking place in the realm of ideas, Thomas More, in his
_Utopia_, and Campanella in his _City of the Sun_, published their
conceptions of an ideal state, while Machiavelli took society as it
was, and in his _Prince_ suggested how it might be governed better.
These are all evidences that there was dissatisfaction with existing
systems, but no unanimity of opinion as to possible improvements.
Later theories were no more satisfactory. The French Revolutionary
philosophers, especially Rousseau, with his theory of voluntary social
contract, and the Utopian dreamers who followed, were longing for
justice and political efficiency, but their theories seem crude and
visionary from the point of view of the social science of the present
day.

386. =Experimenting with Society.=--Robert Owen in England and Fourier
and Saint-Simon in France were prophets of an ideal order which they
tried to establish. Believing that all men were intended to be happy,
and that happiness depended on a reorganization of the social
environment in which property should be socialized, at least in part,
they organized volunteers into model communities, expecting that their
success would attract men everywhere to imitate the new organization.
The arrangement of industry was planned in detail, a co-operative
system was organized that would keep every man busy at useful labor
without working him too hard, would take away the profits of the
middleman by a well-planned system of distribution, and would allow
liberty in social relations as far as consistent with the general
good, but would subordinate the individual to the community. Certain
of the Utopians thought that it would be necessary for the state to
determine the minutiae of daily life, and for a few directors to
prescribe activities, and they introduced a uniformity in dress, food,
and houses that savored of the old-fashioned orphan asylum. These
features, together with the failure to understand that social
institutions could not be made to order, and that human nature was not
of such quality as to make an ideal commonwealth at once actual, soon
wrecked these utopian schemes and brought to an end the first period
of socialistic experiments.

387. =Biological Sociologists.=--Not a few writers in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, before sociology was born, recognized the
need and the possib