5 2o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



noniena presented by the human body may be organized into a knowl 

 edge having the definiteness which constitutes it scientific, in the un- 

 derstood sense of that word. 



If, now, any one, insisting on the incalculableness of a child's 

 future, biographically considered, asserted that the child, therefore, 

 presented no subject-matter for science, ignoring altogether what we 

 will for the moment call its anthropology (though the meaning now 

 given to the word scarcely permits this use of it), he would fall into a 

 conspicuous error an error in this case made conspicuous because we 

 are able daily to observe the difference between an account of the 

 living body, and an account of its conduct and the events that occur 

 to it. 



The reader doubtless anticipates the analogy. What Biography is 

 to Anthropology, History is to Sociology History, I mean, as com- 

 monly conceived. The kind of relation which the sayings and doings, 

 that make up the ordinary account of a man's life, bear to an account 

 of his bodily and mental evolution, structural and functional, is like 

 the kind of relation borne by that narrative of a nation's actions and 

 fortunes its historian gives us, to a description of its institutions, reg- 

 ulative and operative, and the ways in which their structures and 

 functions have gradually established themselves. And if it is an 

 error to say that there is no Science of Man, because the events of a 

 man's life cannot be foreseen, it is equally an error to say that there is 

 no Science of Society, because there can be no prevision of the occur- 

 rences which make up ordinary history. 



Of course, I do not say that the parallel between an individual or- 

 ganism and a social organism is so close that the distinction to be 

 clearly drawn in the one case may be drawn with like clearness in the 

 other. The structures and functions of the social organism are ob- 

 viously far less specific, far more modifiable, far more dependent on 

 conditions that are variable and never twice alike. All I mean is that, 

 as in the one case so in the other, there lie underneath the phenomena 

 of conduct, not forming subject-matter for science, certain vital phe- 

 nomena, which do form subject-matter for science. Just as in the man 

 there are structures and functions which make possible the doings his 

 biographer tells of, so in the nation there are structures and functions 

 which make possible the doings its historian tells of; and in both cases 

 it is with these structures and functions, in their origin, development, 

 and decline, that science is concerned. 



To make better the parallel, and further to explain the nature of 

 the Social Science, we must say that the morphology and physiology 

 of Society, instead of corresponding to the morphology and physiology 

 of Man, correspond rather to morphology and physiology in general. 

 Social organisms, like individual organisms, are to be arranged into 

 classes and sub-classes not, indeed, into classes and sub-classes having 



