Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/81

 had been emerging in the late nineteenth century, little had been done to link them into what could be termed a social science, a study of society as an evolving unitary system. Hobhouse, setting himself to this task, brought the necessary equipment of a philosopher, with the conception of progressive human values which cannot be got from a purely inductive study of human activities and institutions, but is yet essential to give human meaning to social progress. Professor Ginsberg states the problem in the following lucid terms. “The scientific problem is to correlate the several aspects of social change and to measure the kind and amount of growth in the light of criteria not necessarily ethical but analogous to those that might be employed by the biologist in dealing with organic evolution. The ethical problem is to determine whether the development thus established, if it be established, satisfies ethical standards of value. The former type of investigation leads to a comparative study of culture deriving its data from anthropology and history, and seeks to discover whether there is a thread of continuity running through the tangle of the countless processes convergent and divergent which make up the life of man on earth. The other presupposes an ethical theory and a method of applying ethical criteria to the phases of historical development.”

Progress of personality as a harmonious development