670 SOCIAL SCIENCE 



coupled with more perfect integration as a distinguishing mark of 

 the higher types of social living, of those types which, because they 

 are higher, we ought to favor. Let me briefly remark, at this point, 

 that simplification rather than differentiation even though the differ- 

 entiation be accompanied by integration - - seems to be in many ways 

 the sign of progress. The monogamic family itself (I need not say 

 that I regard it as the higher type) is very much simpler than the 

 form of family described by Morgan. The modern type of mono- 

 gamic family is much less complex compared with the family of a few 

 generations ago, when collateral relatives formed an integral part 

 of the family group. The modern family, consisting of father, 

 mother, and children, having very slight and unstable connection 

 with aunts, uncles, and cousins, has developed along the lines not 

 of differentiation but of simplification. It would, however, be a 

 more precise expression of what I believe to be the facts, to say 

 that progress is marked by a tendency to simplification in some 

 directions, to differentiation in other directions. But what the 

 relation of these two tendencies should be, in how far we ought to 

 simplify life, in how far make it more complex - - to this problem, 

 what is called the general law of evolution, as formulated by Spencer 

 and adopted by others, gives us, so far as I can see, not the slight- 

 est clue. In passing, I may observe that to formulate an equation 

 between conduct moral and conduct highly differentiated seems to 

 me most misleading. The conduct of a modern bank burglar is 

 highly differentiated, and so far as he organizes the totality of his 

 nefarious designs with a view to the achievement of a single purpose, 

 it is also highly integrated. The conduct of an humble washerwoman 

 in a tenement-house, who wears out her life in order to keep her 

 children at school and to give them a better chance than she had 

 herself, is undifferentiated and simple. But who will question the 

 moral worth of conduct in the latter case, or fail in the former case 

 to find it wanting altogether? The law of complexity is no guide. 



A similar train of reflections, to refer briefly to other principal 

 social problems of the day, will show, for instance, how little the 

 study of religion can supply us with rules by which to shape the 

 religious development of the future, how little the study of industrial 

 development can aid us in determining the ends toward which the 

 industrial development of society should be guided. 



Take the science of religion. We have mastered the facts of 

 animism, fetichism, ancestor- worship; we have psychologically re- 

 constructed the steps that led to polytheism. We have penetrated, 

 let us assume, the inner meaning of the religions of the Chinese, of 

 Persia, of the Hindus, of the Greeks. We have traced the develop- 

 ment of Hebraism up to the time of its junction with Hellenism; 

 we have followed the wavering fortunes of Roman Catholicism and 



