Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/80

 conformity with the new and more enlightened conceptions of welfare.

This signifies a conception of social evolution, family, tribal, national, cosmopolitan, in which ethics, politics, and economics play their respective inter-related parts. So we seem to pass into the intellectual realm of sociology. Now sociology, connected with the names of Comte and Herbert Spencer, had not yet won in this country, or anywhere save in America, any firm acceptance as a science. When a society of sociology was first founded here in the beginning of this century by the efforts of Patrick Geddes, Victor Branford, and a few other active thinkers, it seemed to many of us a precarious project, partly because it appeared to conflict with the tendency to specialize and subdivide which the conception of “thoroughness” involved. But this was not the only difficulty. The men I have named had committed themselves more closely to the Le Play interpretation of social evolution in terms of Place, Work, and Folk than others, even among those who welcomed the formation of the new organization, were willing to go. This was especially applicable to L. T. Hobhouse who, though rendering active help in forming the Society, regarded as somewhat strained and even fantastic some of the positions and terminology of the Le Play School. Though various scientific studies of social activities and institutions, such as comparative religion, mythology, law, morality,