SPENCER'S SOCIOLOGICAL DATA 249

makes him a purist in science, enables him to recall
difficult exceptions, makes him distrustful of the
summing-up phrases which cover a multitude of
individualised occurrences. But just as the specialist
is indispensable, so there can be no science without
interpretation.

We presume, however, that the historians agree
with Spencer that their chief aim is to give an
account, as rational as is possible for them,
of the movement of human history, as Gibbon, for
instance, did in his " Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire," but that they have a scientific instinct of
recoil from generalising formulae, and probably doubt
the validity of some of Spencer's. We presume that
they admit that all events are not equally important,
and that they are laws of perspective applicable to
historical pictures, but that they doubt Spencer's
competence—especially after that sentence of his
regarding Greece and Rome—to act as judge of what
is important or in proportion. Just as the descriptive
naturalist justly resents any dictation from the
biologist as to what is or is not worth observing, so
the descriptive historian resents the sociologist's
interference. And it is to be feared that men, both
in history and in life, were too much mere
"phenomena" to the Synthetic Philosopher, and that
his Sociology was more biological than human.

Spencer's Sociological Data.—Spencer may be accused
of a lack of personal interest in the details of human
history, of a lack of appreciation of what modern
societies owe to the past, and of taking too mechanical
a view of social evolution, but to accuse him of a
priori methods is gratuitously unjust. Darwin in hisothing is common or unclean,