Aristocracy and evolution Author:William Hurrell Mallock Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Those who complain so justly of the failure of social science and who yet show themselves altogether at a loss to account for it, might have seen their way in th... more »e fact just to answering this question had they concentrated referred to— . " n . . J that social their attention on a point that was just now alluded auemcpetsto to. It was just now observed that the problems dtotactrefsof Wich social science aims at answering, and is questions; popularly expected to answer, are of two distinct kinds — the philosophic or religious, and the practi- . cal; the former being concerned with the destinies of humanity as a whole, with movements extending over enormous periods of time, and with the remote past and future far more than with the present; the other being concerned exclusively with the present or the near future, and with changes that will affect either ourselves or our own children. and one set— Now it will be found that social science, whilst busy- speculative— ing itself with both these sets of problems, has met with the failures which are alleged against it, only in dealing with the latter, and that, so far as regards the former, it has successfully reached conclusions comparable in precision and solidity to those of the physicists and biologists whose methods it has so conscientiously followed. Professor Marshall's own treatise on The Principles of Economics, and that of Mr. Kidd on Social Evolution likewise, abound in admissions that this statement of the case is correct. Professor Marshall's account of the rise and fall of civilisation as caused by climate, by geographical position, and the influence of one race and one civilisation on another, — an account of which heSUCCESS OF SPECULATIVE SOCIOLOGY 13 places in the very forefront ...« less