The history of sociology offered in the following pages is intended to be comprehensive but not exhaustive. It is inevitable that, in the preparation of such an account, considerable reliance will be placed upon secondary sources; although sociology is, relatively, a "new science," it is old enough to have a literature too extensive for any one person to have nest-hand acquaintance with all of it. The secondary sources are much more adequate for the development of general social thought down to the latter part of the nineteenth century than for the recent period.
