270 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



equally long discipline by which the inventive faculty, almost wholly 

 absent in the savage, has been evolved, and by which accuracy, not 

 even conceived by the savage, has been cultivated. And there is 

 further presupposed the slow political and social progress, at once 

 cause and consequence of these other changes, that has brought us 

 to a state in which such a machine finds a function to fulfil. 



The complexity of a sociological fact, and the difficulty of adequate- 

 ly grasping it, will now perhaps be more apparent. For as in this 

 case there has been a genesis, so has there been in every other case, 

 be it of institution, arrangement, custom, belief, etc. ; but while in 

 this case the genesis is comparatively easy to trace, because of the 

 comparatively concrete character of process and product, it is in other 

 cases difficult to trace, because the factors are mostly not of a sensible 

 kind. And yet only when the genesis has been traced only when the 

 various antecedents of all orders have been observed in their coopera- 

 tion, generation after generation, through past social states is there 

 reached that interpretation of a fact which makes it a part of sociologi- 

 cal science, properly understood. If, for instance, the true meaning of 

 such phenomena as those presented by trade-combinations is to be seen, 

 it is needful to go back to those remote old English periods when anal- 

 ogous causes produced analogous results. As Brentano points out : 



" The workmen formed their Trade-Unions against the aggressions of the 

 then rising manufacturing lords, as in earlier times the old freemen formed their 

 Frith-Gilds against the tyranny of mediosval magnates, and the free handicrafts- 

 men their Craft-Gilds against the aggressions of the Old-burghers." l 



Then, having studied the successive forms of such organizations in re- 

 lation to the successive industrial states, there have to be observed the 

 ways in which they are severally related to other phenomena of their 

 respective times the political institutions, the class distinctions, the 

 family arrangements, the modes of distribution and degrees of inter- 

 course between localities, the amounts of knowledge, the religious be- 

 liefs, the morals, the sentiments, the customs, the ideas. Considered 

 as parts of a nation, having structures that form parts of its structure 

 and actions that modify and are modified by its actions, these trade- 

 societies can have their full meanings perceived only when they are 

 studied in their serial genesis through many centuries, and their 

 changes considered in relation to simultaneous changes throughout the 

 social organism. And even then there remains the deeper inquiry 

 How does it happen that in nations of certain types no analogous insti- 

 tutions exist, and that in nations of other types the analogous institu- 

 tions have taken forms more or less different ? 



That phenomena so involved cannot be seen as they truly are, even 

 by the highest intelligence at present existing, is tolerably manifest. 

 And it is manifest also that a Science of Society is likely for a long 



1 Brentano's "Introduction to Early English Guilds," p. cxiv. 



