""Given the chance, I have always deserted anything that might have contemporary practical importance or that might lead to reforms. I have deserted the twentieth century for the thirteenth, social pathology for primitive kinship, industrial sociology for the study of small groups. It may have been mere escapism... My nerves may have been too weak for the modern world. What never failed to interest me was not sociology as an agent of change or as a means of understanding my immediate environment but sociology as a generalizing science. What were the best possibilities for establishing generalizations? What were the main intellectual issues? By what handle shall we lay hold on it? ""