io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



required to mould national characters and habits and sentiments, will 

 the truly important results of a public policy show themselves ? Let 

 us consider the question a little further. 



In a society living, growing, changing, every new factor becomes 

 a permanent force ; modifying more or less the direction of movement 

 determined by the aggregate of forces. Never simple and direct, but, 

 by the cooperation of so many causes, made irregular, involved, and 

 always rhythmical, the course of social change can never be judged of 

 in its general direction by inspecting any small portion of it. Each 

 action will inevitably be followed, after a while, by some direct or 

 indirect reaction, and this again by a re-reaction ; and, until the suc- 

 cessive effects have shown themselves, it is impossible to say how the 

 total motion will be modified. You must compare positions at great 

 distances from one another in time, before you can perceive rightly 

 where things are tending. Even so simple a thing as a curve of single 

 curvature cannot have its nature determined unless there is a con- 

 siderable length of it. See here these four points close together. The 

 curve passing through them may be a circle, an ellipse, a parabola, an 

 hyperbola ; or it may be a catenarian, a cycloid, a spiral. Let the 

 points be farther apart, and it becomes possible to form some opinion 

 of the nature of the curve it is obviously not a circle. Let them be 

 more remote still, and it may be seen that it is neither an ellipse nor 

 a parabola. And, when the distances are relatively great, the mathe- 

 matician can say with certainity what curve alone will pass through 

 them all. Surely, then, in such complex and slowly-evolving move- 

 ments as those of a nation's life, all the smaller and greater rhythms 

 of which fall within certain general directions, it is impossible that 

 such general directions can be traced by looking at stages that are 

 close together it is impossible that the effect wrought on any general, 

 direction, by some additional force, can be truly computed from obser- 

 vations extending over but a few years, or but a few generations. 



For, in the case of these most-involved of all movements, there is 

 the difficulty, paralleled in no other movements (being only approached 

 in those of individual evolution), that each new factor, besides affecting 

 in an immediate way the course of a movement, affects it also in a 

 remote way by changing the amounts and directions of all other 

 factors. A fresh influence brought into play on a society not only 

 affects its members directly in their acts, but also indirectly in their 

 characters. Continuing to work on their characters generation after 

 generation, and modifying by inheritance the feelings which they bring 

 into social life at large, this influence alters the intensities and bearings 

 of all other influences throughout the society. By slowly initiating 

 modifications of Nature, it brings into play forces of many kinds, in- 

 calculable in their strengths and tendencies, that act without regard 

 to the original influence, and may produce quite opposite effects. 



