useful work is done by our social reformers; but, in our opinion, they are attempting to attain ends which, if attainable at all, are not to be reached until there is a far clearer understanding of their conditions, and of the principles by which the progress of society is controlled. The Association seems to be but little in advance of an ordinary political convention. Its teachers appear to start from the fundamental postulate of politics, that human society is the product of government, that its regulative laws are the result of majority votes, and consequently that legislation is to be invoked for every thing. There is little recognition of a sphere of natural activities, spontaneous, and self-adjusting, with which government can only meddle for disturbance and mischief; and, of course, there is no investigation of it. What things it is impossible to effect by political agencies, what had better be left to private enterprise, what is the effect of constant intermeddling, and what are the values and limits of those activities which belong to the natural constitution of society, are not among the primary subjects of inquiry. Yet a true social science must, first of all, throw light upon these questions, and, if its effect is to explode many fallacies—to show that the perpetual motions, the philosophers' stones, and the elixirs of life of social projectors, are only groundless fancies—the result must be accepted with never a doubt that, in place of the discredited crotchets, more rational and valuable devices will arise.
THE PRINCIPLES OF SOCIOLOGY.
The short article on climate and social development which we reprint from advance-sheets of the "Principles of Sociology," by Herbert Spencer, will be welcomed by many as showing the progress of his great work, and that he has at length fairly entered upon that important division of it which deals with the phenomena of society. The "Principles of Sociology," as they will constitute the largest division of his philosophical series, will probably be also its most important division. Mr. Spencer took up social subjects as matters of study in his youth. One of his first publications at the age of twenty-two was, his letters on the "Proper Sphere of Government," in which society was considered from the scientific point of view, or as having its natural laws of regulation and development. Eight years later he published "Social Statics," in which these ideas were expanded and extended, but the completion of this work only brought him fairly to the threshold of the subject. He saw that it must be treated in a far more systematic way, and after ten years of labor directed to a large number of social questions, and working out the principle of Evolution as applied to them, he began his philosophical system in 1860. Fourteen years of labor have brought him to the point from which he started thirty-two years ago, enriched in ideas by a long course of investigation preparatory to dealing with the sociological problems now before him. He begins the "Sociology" as he began the "Biology" and the "Psychology," with the consideration of its data. Those who have examined the "Descriptive Sociology" will remember that at the heads of the tables a class of facts is presented, concerning the various conditions of the country, physical and climatic, with its productions and resources, and the characters of its inhabitants, mental and emotional, by which the state of society is modified, and which of course vary greatly with different communities. After defining Sociology in the first chapter on "Super-Organic Evolution," in which the significance and value of the social instincts exhibited by insects and the lower animals are considered, Mr. Spencer passes in Chapter II. to "The Factors of Social Phenomena,"
