Unfortunately, these are essentially public considerations. The private individual, with the odds overwhelmingly against him as a social climber, dreams even in the deepest poverty of some bequest or freak of fortune by which he may become a capitalist, and dreads that the little he has may be snatched from him by that terrible and unintelligible thing, State policy. Thus the pri vate person's vote is the vote of Ananias and Sapphira ; and democracy becomes a more effective bar to Socialism than the pliant and bewildered conservatism of the plutocracy. Under such conditions the future is unpredictable. Empires end in ruins: commonwealths have hitherto been beyond the civic capacity of mankind. But there is always the possibility that mankind will this time weather the cape on which all the old civilizations have been wrecked. It is this possibility that gives intense interest to the present historic moment and keeps the Socialist movement alive and militant. (G. B. S.) SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. Social philosophy may be divided into two main parts, critical or epistemological and constructive or synoptic. The object of the first is to disentangle the fundamental
categories and principles employed by the special social sciences and to test their validity. On its more constructive or synthetic side its business is to correct the onesidedness of the specialized social studies and to endeavour to see social life as a whole. In this respect it is greatly helped by the growing science of sociology (the study of human interactions, their conditions and conse quences), but it differs from the latter chiefly in its attitude to the problem of value. While sociology cannot exclude from its field of study the psychology and history of ideals in so far as they act as agents influencing human behaviour, it is not as such concerned with the validity of these ideals. Social philosophy on the other hand deals with the validity of the application of ethical categories to the phenomena of social life and development which it studies from the point of view of their contribution to ends or purposes to which we can ascribe intrinsic value.