264 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



This double difficulty of thought, with the double set of delusions 

 fallen into by those who do not surmount it, is, indeed, naturally asso- 

 ciated with the once-universal, and still-general, belief that societies 

 arise by manufacture, instead of arising, as they do, by evolution. 

 Recognize the truth that aggregates of men, like other aggregates, 

 grow, and acquire their structural characters through a process of 

 modification upon modification, and there are excluded.these antitheti- 

 cal errors that man remains the same and that man is readily alter- 

 able ; and along with exclusion of these errors comes admission of the 

 inference that the changes which have brought social arrangements to 

 a form so different from past forms will in future carry them on to 

 forms as different from those now existing. Once become habituated 

 to the thought of a continuous unfolding of the whole and of each 

 part, and these misleading ideas disappear. Take a word and observe 

 how, while changing, it gives origin in course of time to a family of 

 words, each changing member of which similarly has progeny ; take a 

 custom, as that of giving eggs at Easter, which has now developed 

 in Paris into the fashion of making expensive presents of every 

 imaginable kind enclosed in imitation-eggs, becoming at length large 

 enough to contain a brougham, and which entails so great a tax that 

 people go abroad to evade it ; take a law, once quite simple and made 

 to meet a special case, and see how it eventually, by successive addi- 

 tions and changes, grows up into a complex group of laws, as, out of 

 two statutes of William the Conqueror came our whole system of stat- 

 utes regulating land-tenure ; 1 take a social appliance, like the press, 

 and see how from the news-letter, originally private and written, and 

 then assuming the shape of a printed fly-leaf to a written private let- 

 ter, there has, little by little, evolved this vast assemblage of journals 

 and periodicals, daily, weekly, general, and local, that have, individu- 

 ally and as an aggregate, grown in size while growing in heterogeneity 

 do this, and do the like with all other established institutions, agen- 

 cies, products, and there will come naturally the conviction that now, 

 too, there are various germs of things which will in the future develop 

 in ways no one imagines and take shares in profound transformations 

 of society amd of its members transformations that are hopeless as 

 immediate results, but certain as ultimate results. 



Try to fit a hand with five fingers into a glove with four. Your 

 difficulty aptly parallels the difficulty of putting a complex conception 

 into a mind not having an adequately complex faculty. In proportion 

 as the several terms and relations which make up a thought become 

 numerous and varied, there must be brought into play numerous and 

 varied parts of the intellectual structure, before the thought can be 

 comprehended ; and, if some of these parts are wanting, only fragments 

 of the thought, and not the thought as a whole, can be taken in. Con- 



1 Reeves, "History of English Law," vol. i., pp. 34-36 (second edition). 



