Excerpt from The Philosophy of Progress in Human Affairs Sociology, or Social Science, was necessarily a late growth of the human mind, and could not exist until the various sciences that branch into it had received a considerable development. Its object is to trace the laws that regulate the varied and complex phenomena of social life, which it seeks to elucidate by the method of observation and experiment, and especially of deduction from principles that the human mind when applied to these subjects is led to recognize as true. The idea of law, method, order, or unchanging continuity of Divine will, has entered more or less into the philosophy of all times. Without it, sociology could not have arisen within the horizon of human thought, and in that science this idea receives its idea pervading and comprehensive form. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.