creative energies of men, where society as a whole is concerned, are, in this philosophy, conceived as bursting through the husks and institutions of the world, not consciously destroying them but shedding them incidentally and passing on. Now as regards sociology there is an obvious fatalism in that; for the burden of proof lies once more on a personal basis, on a personal basis qualified by the capacity of the person. It is true that this creative and constructive tendency, like the total tendency of modern life, is in the direction of socialism, it is true that a thousand elements in modern life which could never be engaged in the class-war are led by it into line with socialism. Yet there capitalism is! Only the blackbrowed Marxian steadily contemplates the fact that year by year the rich compound their riches and the poor their poverty, while those that have no chance of creative outlets plant dynamite.

I do not mean that Wells is "wrong" in abandoning the economic for the psychological approach, that is plainly the inevitable course for him. I wish simply to mark a distinction.

The gospel of Wells is an entirely personal one; it frankly concerns itself with the inner realities of the human mind, and in that lies its great importance. But let us discriminate. Like every purely personal doctrine it contains, in relation to the facts and causes of society, a certain quietism. It withdraws the mind from corporate action and lays emphasis on corporate thought. But it recognizes no corporate enemy. To be an opponent of capitalism as such, is, in this philosophy, as quaint and crude and crusty as to be an anti-suffragist or a believer in politics (for it has become the fashion to believe with fervor in the franchise and scarcely to believe at all in what the franchise stands for).

There is then a certain danger in the creative pragmatism of this particular time. If it actually does penetrate to the head men of the world, if it is able to generate what I suppose may be called a "moral equivalent" of dutyand there is almost a probability that it willthe hazard is won. If it does not-and many keen thinkers and men of action are obdurate -then we shall simply have the fait accompli

with compound interest. What if it should turn out in the end, after the best brains of socialism had all withdrawn from the economic programme of socialism, that capitalism grows all the greener in the sunlight of their tacit consent? There is Congress, there is Parliament, and there they propose to remain. Suppose they are not converted from the top? Is it altogether wise to stop persecuting them from the bottom?

So much before I pass on. This comment does not qualify the teaching of Wells. It merely supplements it from the economic side, and the supplement seems to me an important

one.

Of a piece with his whole point of view is that he calls the right sociological method not a scientific but an artistic method: it consists of the making and comparing of Utopias. This idea he sets forth in his paper The So-called Science of Sociology. "What is called the scientific method," he says, "the method of observation, of theory about these observations, experiments in verification of that theory and confirmation or modification, really 'comes off""

in the sciences in which the individuality of the units can be pretty completely ignored." The method that is all-important in the primary physical sciences where the individuality of atoms and molecules may conveniently be ignored for the sake of practical truth, becomes in his view proportionately untrue as the sciences in their gradation approach the human world. "We cannot," he says in First and Last Things, "put humanity into a museum and dry it for examination; our one still living specimen is all history, all anthropology, and the fluctuating world of men. There is no satisfactory means of dividing it and nothing in the real world with which to compare it. We have only the remotest idea of its 'life-cycle' and a few relics of its origin and dreams of its destiny." And in the paper I have just mentioned he speaks of the Social Idea as a thing "struggling to exist and realize itself in a world of egotisms, animals, and brute matter. Now I submit it is not only a legitimate form of approach, but altogether the most promising and hopeful form of approach, to endeavor to disentangle and

express one's personal version of that idea, and to measure realities from the standpoint of that realization. I think, in fact, that the creation of Utopias-and their exhaustive criticism-is the proper and distinctive method of sociology." This notion of sociology as properly artistic in method and diagnostic in aim indicates his main divergence from the methods and aims of Comte and Spencer.

And so one turns to his own illustration of this belief, A Modern Utopia. It is a beautiful Utopia, beautifully seen and beautifully thought; and it has in it some of that flavor of airy unrestraint one finds in News from Nowhere. Morris, of course, carries us into a world where right discipline has long since produced right will, so wholly and instinctively socialized that men can afford to be as free as anarchists would have the unsocialized men of our own time, a world such as Goethe had in mind when he said: "There is in man a force, a spring of goodness which counterbalances egoism; and if by a miracle it could for a moment suddenly be active in all men, the earth would at once be free from evil." Well, that