PROFESSIONAL INSTITUTIONS. 35 



which the professions in general subserve. It is obvious that the 

 medical man who removes pains, sets broken bones, cures dis- 

 eases, and wards off premature death, increases the amount of 

 life. Musical composers and performers, as well as professors of 

 music and dancing, are agents who exalt the emotions and so 

 increase life. The poet, epic, lyric or dramatic, along with the 

 actor, severally in their respective ways yield pleasurable feelings 

 and so increase life. The historian and the man of letters, to 

 some extent by the guidance they furnish, but to a larger extent 

 by the interest which their facts and fictions create, raise men's 

 mental states and so increase life. Though we can not say of the 

 lawyer that he does the like in a direct way, yet by aiding the citi- 

 zen to resist aggressions he furthers his sustentation and thereby 

 increases life. The multitudinous processes and appliances which 

 the man of science makes possible, as well as the innumerable 

 intellectual interests he arouses and the general illumination he 

 yields, increase life. The teacher, alike by information given 

 and by discipline enforced, enables his pupils more effectually to 

 carry on this or that occupation and obtain better subsistence than 

 they would else do, at the same time that he opens the doors to 

 various special gratifications : in both ways increasing life. Once 

 more, those who carry on the plastic arts the painter, the sculp- 

 tor, the architect excite by their products pleasurable percep- 

 tions and emotions of the aesthetic class, and thus increase life. 



In what way do the professions arise ? From what pre-exist- 

 ing social tissue are they differentiated to put the question in 

 evolutionary language ? Recognizing the general truth, vari- 

 ously illustrated in the preceding parts of this work [The Princi- 

 ples of Sociology], that all social structures result from specializa- 

 tions of a relatively homogeneous mass, our first inquiry must be 

 in which part of such mass do professional institutions origi- 

 nate.* 



* When, more than twenty years ago, the first part of the Descriptive Sociology was is- 

 sued, there appeared in a leading weekly journal, specially distinguished as the organ of 

 university culture, a review of it, which, sympathetically written though it was, contained 

 the following remark : " We are at a loss to understand why the column headed ' Profes- 

 sional,' and representing the progress of the secular learned professions . . . appears in 

 the tables as a subdivision of 'Ecclesiastical.' " 



The raising of this question shows how superficial is the historical culture ordinarily 

 provided. In all probability the writer of the review knew all about the births, deaths, and 

 marriages of our kings ; had read the accounts of various peoples given by Herodotus ; 

 could have passed an examination in Thucydides ; and besides acquaintance with Gibbon, 

 probably had considerable knowledge of the wars carried on, and dynastic mutations suf- 

 fered, by most European nations. Yet of a general law in the evolution of societies he was 

 evidently ignorant conspicuous though it is. For when attention is given, not to the gossip 

 of history, but to the facts which are from time to time incidentally disclosed respecting 

 the changes of social organizations ; and when such changes exhibited in one society are 



