Yale has taken steps to repair this deficiency. He says, that university has appointed two gentlemen to lectureships upon these subjects, with the following qualifications: they are "both of them eminent examples of the application of thorough intellectual training to practical politics;" and the hope is expressed that a space will be allowed in the curriculum proportionate to the importance of the subjects. We cordially concur with him in this desire, and cannot doubt that advantage will arise from the teachings of the able men selected to take the professorships; but we hold that merely to make a "place" for these studies or to engraft them on the classical stock, or to intrust their exposition to gentlemen whose qualifications are only the application of "thorough intellectual training to practical politics," is a quite inadequate preparation for the work to be done.
Social and political sciences are confessedly the most complex, obscure, and difficult of all the sciences; so much so that it is hardly yet understood what is meant by the terms, even by those who use them most freely. We have looked through the reports of the Social-Science Associations—English and American—for something like a clear definition of what social science is. This question was formally attacked, not long ago, at a convention in Boston, by men whose names are eminent in connection with the subject, but there was the most extraordinary disagreement, and a tacit confession of the impossibility of the task. The proceedings of these bodies abundantly attest this vagueness and conflict of opinion. They mainly consist of philanthropic projects and reformatory schemes for public improvement plans—for repairing the defects of society—which would be better described as social art than social science. With such loose and erroneous notions in regard to the subject itself, we are hardly to expect any clear views of its proper place in education. We have had centuries of that "thorough intellectual training," which it has been the boast of universities to give, applied to "practical politics" without so much as even discovering the existence of a social science. A higher education, which prides itself on the perfection of its mental discipline, and which sacrifices every thing else to this idea, has thrown its graduates by thousands, age after age, into political and public life to very little purpose, so far as the increase of our scientific knowledge of society is concerned; and for the obvious reason that the vaunted mental discipline has not been of a scientific character, and is therefore valueless for great scientific ends. This inquiry is, however, being worked out in a series of articles now appearing in the Popular Science Monthly. And it is well here to note that this difficult and important work is being first thoroughly done by a thinker whose intellectual training was not obtained at the university, who knows nothing of Greek and Latin, and has had very little to do with practical politics. His preparation, indeed, is such as the universities would not have afforded, and the chances are high that, if he had submitted himself to their guidance, and had his mind drilled in youth by their methods, and filled with their ideas, the great work that he is now doing would have been impossible for him. His preparation has consisted in the life-long study of science. He has mastered its various departments, and attested this mastery by original discoveries in its physical and biological branches; and, having given his whole life to these studies and obtained a knowledge of them which Mr. Mill has pronounced "encyclopædic," he has the indispensable preparation for the work of extending science in its higher and unexplored applications to social phenomena.
If there be a social science, it is be-
