If what we desire to do is to estimate, as speculative philosophers, the significance of the human race in relation to the universe or its Author, by considering its origin on this planet, and its subsequent fortunes hitherto, what interests us is man in the mass, or societies, and not individuals.

But if we are interested in any problem of practical life--such, for example, as how to cure cancer, or cut a navigable canal through a broad and mountainous isthmus, or decorate a public building with a series of great frescoes--the central point of interest is the individual and not society.

How would a mother, whose child was hovering between life and death, be comforted by the information that man was a great physician?
How would America be helped in the construction of the Panama Canal by learning from sociologists that man could remove mountains?
How could great pictures be secured for a public building by information to the effect that the greatest of all great artists depended for their exceptional power on the aggregate of conditions surrounding them, when ten millions of men whose surrounding conditions were similar might be tried in succession without one being found who rose in art above the level of vulgar mediocrity?
It is not that the generalisations of the evolutionary sociologists with regard to man in the mass, or societies, are untrue philosophically.
Philosophically they are of the utmost moment.

It is that they have no bearing on the problems of contemporary life, and that they miss out the one factor by which they are brought into connection with it.
Let us take, for example, the way in which Herbert Spencer illustrates the general theorem of the evolutionary sociologists by the case of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's debt to his times.

"Given a Shakespeare," he says, "and what dramas could he have written without the multitudinous conditions of civilised life around him--without the various traditions which, descending to him from the past, gave wealth to his thought, and without the language which a hundred generations had developed and enriched by use ?" The answer to this question is to be found in the counter-question that is provoked by it.