THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. 271 



time hence to be recognized by but few ; since not only is there in 

 most cases an absence of faculty complex enough to grasp its complex 

 phenomena, but there is mostly an absolute unconsciousness that there 

 are any such complex phenomena to be grasped. 



To the want of a due complexity of coneeptive faculty, there has to 

 be added, as a further difficulty, the want of due plasticity of concep- 

 tive faculty. The general ideas of nearly all men have been framed 

 out of experiences gathered within comparatively narrow areas ; and 

 general ideas so framed are far too rigid readily to admit the multitu- 

 dinous and varied combinations of facts which Sociology presents. 

 The child of Puritanic parents, brought up in the belief that Sabbath- 

 breaking brings after it all kinds of transgressions, and having had 

 pointed out, in the village or small town that formed his world, vari- 

 ous instances of this connection, is somewhat perplexed in after-years, 

 when acquaintance with more of his countrymen has shown him exem- 

 plary lives joined with non-observance of the Sunday. When he adds 

 to his experiences by Continental travel, and finds that the best people 

 of foreign societies disregard injunctions which he once thought essen- 

 tial to right conduct, he still further widens his originally small and 

 stiff conception. Now, the process thus exemplified, in a single belief 

 of a comparatively superficial kind, has to be gone through with nu- 

 merous beliefs of deeper kinds, before there can be reached the flexibili- 

 ty of thought required for dealing properly with sociological phenom- 

 ena. Not in one direction, but in nearly all directions, we have to 

 learn that those connections of social facts which we commonly regard 

 as natural, and even necessary, are not at all necessary, and often have 

 no particular naturalness. On contemplating past social states, we are 

 continually reminded that many arrangements, and practices, and con- 

 victions, that seem matters of course, are very modern ; and we are 

 continually forgetting that many things we now regard as impossible 

 were quite possible a few centuries ago. Still more, on studying soci- 

 eties alien in race as well as in stage of civilization, we perpetually 

 meet with things not only contrary to every thing we should have 

 thought probable, but even such as we should have scarcely hit upon 

 in trying to conceive the most unlikely and even impossible things. 



Take in illustration the varieties of domestic relations. That mo- 

 nogamy is not the only kind of marriage, we are, indeed, early taught 

 by our Bible-lessons. But though the conception of polygamy is thus 

 made somewhat familiar, it does not occur to us that polyandry is also 

 a possible arrangement ; and we are surprised on first learning that it 

 not only exists, but was once extremely general. When we contem- 

 plate these marital institutions unlike our own, we cannot at first 

 imagine that they can be practised with a sense of propriety like that 

 with which we practise ours. Yet Livingstone narrates that, in a tribe 

 bordering one of the Central African lakes, the women were quite dis- 



