- •An Englishman Looks at the World
- •I do not think that the arrival of m. Blйriot means a panic resort to
- •Imminent. We ancient survivors of those who believed in and wrote about
- •In immediate contact with his occupation, because the only way for him
- •Immediate future will, I am convinced, be very largely the history of
- •Inundation of loyalty. The most elaborately conceived, the most stately
- •Is to be no rфle of almost indifferent abstinence from the broad
- •Into a secondary position among the peoples of the world?
- •In blood and bitterness the obvious fact that barbed wire had its
- •Irksome thoroughness, could oblige Canada to remain in the Empire if the
- •In an open drawer in my bureau there lies before me now a crumpled card
- •It meridianally. Obviously its main routes and trades and relations lie
- •In the end it will be lost, I fear, by the intellectual inertness of
- •In the unfolding record of behaviour it is the stewardesses and bandsmen
- •Indiscipline. And the remedy in the first place lies not in social
- •It prevents their settlement, and leads to their renewal. I have tried
- •If those old class reliances on which our system is based are to be
- •Is absolutely antagonistic to the creative impulses of the constructive
- •Independent representative man at a hopeless disadvantage against the
- •In the preceding pages I have discussed certain aspects of the present
- •Is the need of getting a living. But that is not the complete answer.
- •Illiterate, incurious; he read nothing, lived his own life, and if he
- •In the place of that old convenient labour comes a new sort of labour,
- •Is over, but of establishing a new method of co-operation with those who
- •If we are to meet these enlarged requirements upon which the insurgent
- •It is indeed no disaster, but a matter for sincere congratulation that
- •Impossible upon any basis of weekly wages and intermittent employment;
- •Imperceptible increments into a method of salary and pension--for it is
- •View. The employer's concern with the man who does his work is day-long
- •It hard to see how we can reconcile the intermittency of competitive
- •Immense opportunity for voluntary effort. Deference to our official
- •Its serving, as the means and instrument of that national conference
- •1800! "No current politics," whispers the schoolmaster, "no
- •Is exactly what everybody seems to be doing in our present discussion
- •It is merely a gust of abuse and insult for schools, and more
- •Insistence upon creative power than has been shown in the past, but for
- •Impatient of the large constructive developments of modern Socialism,
- •In order to do so it has been convenient to coin two expressions, and to
- •Individuals, and the individuals are grouped in generally monogamic
- •Intensive culture. There may be an adjacent Wild supplying wood, and
- •Intermarries within its limits.
- •It at a page where the surplus forces appear to be in more or less
- •Inevitable social basis. If that is so, then the new ways of living may
- •Innovation and to give a direction and guidance to all of us who
- •Intelligent democratic statecraft from the economic aggressions of large
- •In his repudiation of and antagonism to plans and arrangements, in his
- •Imperialist, and so do the American civic and social reformers. Under
- •Influence outside the socialist ranks altogether. Few wealthy people
- •Its huge development of expropriated labour, and the schemes of the
- •Is already food, shelter, and clothing of a sort for everyone, in spite
- •Intelligent science of economics should afford standards and
- •Vindictiveness for construction. Supremely important is it to keep
- •Impart it. And our Empire is at a peculiar disadvantage in the matter,
- •In the present armament competition there are certain considerations
- •I want to suggest that we are spending too much money in the former and
- •Industrious increase of men of the officer-aviator type, of the
- •India resuming its former central position in our ideas of international
- •Impulses making life sweet. He wants romance without its defiance, and
- •It is a merit in a hunter to refuse even the highest of fences. Nearly
- •Is reflected upon the novel from a difference in the general way of
- •Intellectual revolution amidst which we are living to-day, that
- •Very like the crumplings and separations and complications of an immense
- •Is by comparison irresponsible and free. Because its characters are
- •I am now about to make for an absolutely free hand for the novelist in
- •Indeed, is why I am giving them this library."
- •Visitors who would have the power to examine qualifications, endorse the
- •It has been one of the less possible dreams of my life to be a painted
- •In charge of the expert, that wonderful last gift of time. He will talk
- •In a very obvious way, sociology seemed to Comte to crown the edifice of
- •Incorrect one is infinitely more convenient.
- •Individuality as pieces of cloud; they come, they go, they fuse and
- •If this contention is sound, if therefore we boldly set aside Comte and
- •Is no such thing in sociology as dispassionately considering what _is_,
- •Is not an eternal bond, but a bond we may break on this account or that,
- •In discussing what the common experience confutes Neither is it
- •Infidelity leading to supposititious children in the case of the wife,
- •Is a nastiness, a stream of social contagion and an extreme cruelty, and
- •Is difficult to avoid agreeing with him either in his observation or in
- •Interest an intelligent adolescent. At the approach of all such things
- •In our modern world. So long as they remain "unencumbered" they can
- •Income tax there would be no social injustice whatever in such an
- •Increase the inducement until it sufficed.
- •Instead of his being a private adventurer, he were a member of a sanely
- •Is the specialist available; there are no properly organised information
- •If one looks into the conditions of industrial employment specialisation
- •In no way is this disappearance of specialisation more marked than in
- •Is there a people?
- •Is entirely made up of the individuals that compose it, and that the
- •In Great Britain and France is particularly remarkable. These people
- •India and South Africa which will, if they are not arrested, end in our
- •Instead of this arrangement, your community is divided into twelve
- •Voters who would have voted for a if they had a chance vote instead for
- •I trust the reader will bear with me through these alphabetical
- •I had the slightest confidence. Commonly my choice of a "representative"
- •Impossible nearly every way of forcing candidates upon constituencies,
- •I imagined in my last paper, a constituency in which candidates
- •Is at bottom a foolish thing, and that electoral methods are to pacify
- •Individualised figures; and at the end they would be only half a dozen
- •It will be a much smaller part in the new than in the old. It is like
- •1840 Has, with the exception of the East European Jews, consisted of
- •If we compare any European nation with the American, we perceive at once
- •It followed the normal development of the middle class under Progress
- •Is, in fact, in process of destroying the realities of freedom and
- •Is a very distinguished man, quite over and above the fact that he is
- •In due course the graveyard rat will gnaw as calmly at
- •In jail. Because out of place, they are a danger. A sorry
- •In the making of very rich men there is always a factor of good fortune
- •Is true that so far American Socialism has very largely taken an
- •Is of an immense general discontent in the working class and of a
- •Violence, taking some other title and far more destructive methods. This
- •Irresistible movement for secession between west and east. That is
- •View of the possible mediatory action of the universities, for
- •In Sec. 5 I enumerated what I called the silent factors in the American
- •Increase had the birth-rate of the opening of the century been
- •Individualist element in the citizen, stands over against and resists
- •Is in New York that one meets the people who matter, and the New York
- •Voices, perplexed as to what they must do, uncertain as to what they may
- •Into the daily papers. At every point there will be economies and
- •It is in quite other directions that the scientific achievements to
- •Interests which legitimately belongs to it.
- •Indigestion as the case may be. No one would be so careless and ignorant
- •It is not only that an amplifying science may give mankind happier
- •Its original circumstances, fitting itself to novel needs, leaving the
- •Invented the plough and the ship, and subjugated most of the domestic
- •It would seem to him a phase of unprecedented swift change and expansion
In a very obvious way, sociology seemed to Comte to crown the edifice of
the sciences; it was to be to the statesman what pathology and
physiology were to the doctor; and one gathers that, for the most part,
he regarded it as an intellectual procedure in no way differing from
physics. His classification of the sciences shows pretty clearly that he
thought of them all as exact logical systematisations of fact arising
out of each other in a synthetic order, each lower one containing the
elements of a lucid explanation of those above it--physics explaining
chemistry; chemistry, physiology; physiology, sociology; and so forth.
His actual method was altogether unscientific; but through all his work
runs the assumption that in contrast with his predecessors he is really
being as exact and universally valid as mathematics. To Herbert
Spencer--very appropriately since his mental characteristics make him
the English parallel to Comte--we owe the naturalisation of the word in
English. His mind being of greater calibre than Comte's, the subject
acquired in his hands a far more progressive character. Herbert Spencer
was less unfamiliar with natural history than with any other branch of
practical scientific work; and it was natural he should turn to it for
precedents in sociological research. His mind was invaded by the idea
of classification, by memories of specimens and museums; and he
initiated that accumulation of desiccated anthropological anecdotes that
still figures importantly in current sociological work. On the lines he
initiated sociological investigation, what there is of it, still tends
to go.
From these two sources mainly the work of contemporary sociologists
derives. But there persists about it a curious discursiveness that
reflects upon the power and value of the initial impetus. Mr. V.V.
Branford, the able secretary of the Sociological Society, recently
attempted a useful work in a classification of the methods of what he
calls "approach," a word that seems to me eminently judicious and
expressive. A review of the first volume the Sociological Society has
produced brings home the aptness of this image of exploratory
operations, of experiments in "taking a line." The names of Dr. Beattie
Crozier and Mr. Benjamin Kidd recall works that impress one as
large-scale sketches of a proposed science rather than concrete
beginnings and achievements. The search for an arrangement, a "method,"
continues as though they were not. The desperate resort to the
analogical method of Commenius is confessed by Dr. Steinmetz, who talks
of social morphology, physiology, pathology, and so forth. There is also
a less initiative disposition in the Vicomte Combes de Lestrade and in
the work of Professor Giddings. In other directions sociological work is
apt to lose its general reference altogether, to lapse towards some
department of activity not primarily sociological at all. Examples of
this are the works of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb, M. Ostrogorski and M.
Gustave le Bon. From a contemplation of all this diversity Professor
Durkheim emerges, demanding a "synthetic science," "certain synthetic
conceptions"--and Professor Karl Pearson endorses the demand--to fuse
all these various activities into something that will live and grow.
What is it that tangles this question so curiously that there is not
only a failure to arrive at a conclusion, but a failure to join issue?
Well, there is a certain not too clearly recognised order in the
sciences to which I wish to call your attention, and which forms the
gist of my case against this scientific pretension. There is a gradation
in the importance of the instance as one passes from mechanics and
physics and chemistry through the biological sciences to economics and
sociology, a gradation whose correlatives and implications have not yet
received adequate recognition, and which do profoundly affect the method
of study and research in each science.
Let me begin by pointing out that, in the more modern conceptions of
logic, it is recognised that there are no identically similar objective
experiences; the disposition is to conceive all real objective being as
individual and unique. This is not a singular eccentric idea of mine; it
is one for which ample support is to be found in the writings of
absolutely respectable contemporaries, who are quite untainted by
association with fiction. It is now understood that conceivably only in
the subjective world, and in theory and the imagination, do we deal with
identically similar units, and with absolutely commensurable quantities.
In the real world it is reasonable to suppose we deal at most with
_practically_ similar units and _practically_ commensurable quantities.
But there is a strong bias, a sort of labour-saving bias in the normal
human mind to ignore this, and not only to speak but to think of a
thousand bricks or a thousand sheep or a thousand sociologists as though
they were all absolutely true to sample. If it is brought before a
thinker for a moment that in any special case this is not so, he slips
back to the old attitude as soon as his attention is withdrawn. This
source of error has, for instance, caught nearly the whole race of
chemists, with one or two distinguished exceptions, and _atoms_ and
_ions_ and so forth of the same species are tacitly assumed to be
similar one to another. Be it noted that, so far as the practical
results of chemistry and physics go, it scarcely matters which
assumption we adopt. For purposes of inquiry and discussion the