T HEORIES to account for the social behavior of human beings have deluged us ever since sociology received recognition as a subject worthy of study. That this has been comparatively recent, as the history of science goes, perhaps may account for the fact that such a vast amnount of sociological literature may perhaps better be placed in the realm of philosophy and metaphysics than in that of science. It is the reaction to this fact, felt surreptitiously by so many working in the field of sociology, that is responsible for the number of papers which have been read and published as to whether sociology may be termed a science, and, if so, just what its place might be. These may be regarded as more or less a groping of minds turned into a field where chaos has reigned, and the chief values of such discussions, it may be asserted, has been to set sociologists thinking about what was wrong with their approach to the subject of the social actions of humans. In the past few years, there has been a group of thinkers who have veered sharply away from the method of sociology which was employed for so large a part of the life of the subject, which consisted of rationalising at length concerning the motives which do or do not produce certain social phenomena, or, more often, which produce whole societies. This method, it may be remarked, has brought no dearth of reasons to account for social phenomena. The characteristic of each, however, has been to put forward the claim of one main-spring which makes society go, and to disregard all the other forces which might be at work. Thus, all cause and reason might be stated as as economic, or was supposed to come from the clash of conflict, or the gathering together of like-minded individuals, or to be due to certain innate biological tendencies which were assumed to be present, or, perhaps, might be simply sociological. And the plausibility of these theories is quite great: certainly no one would deny that all of the forces which have been mentioned are operative to a certain extent, and the main trouble with all these irreconcilable explanations seems to have been that they all insisted on being mutually exclusive. The stimulation to the newer viewpoint, to which those who disagree with the older theories hold, came, in the main, from those students of society who are occupied with societies other than our own, the anthropologists.' They recog-