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352. If society should become useless to individuals it could not exist. It is necessary, therefore to inquire by what individual laws, biological and anthropological, the individual has been brought to form society, and to bring about all the successive transformations it has undergone, principally by the various adaptations of the individual to his natural environment. Now, while it is true that the method of sociology is biological, it must be said that Spencer has not defined what he means by sociology. And in reality it may be said that sociology is not yet supplied with a true and proper definition.

Now, it may not be possible to give a definition without first forming a method of investigation. The fact remains, however, of the scientific inefficiency of the historical method taken alone. To say nothing of the errors in which the German school which proposed it is involved, confined as it is to the study of historic humanity, it does not investigate prehistoric humanity; and moreover, if it has the merit of showing the instability of social phenomena, it must necessarily be supplemented by history, and by ethnography, which we may call contemporaneous history. This is precisely the scientific tendency which, owing to the example of Anguilli and Vanni, is more and more manifesting itself in Italy.

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Editor of the Rivista di Sociologia, Rome.

Translated from the Italian by I. W. Howerth.