2 8o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



point of view. But the difficulties above set forth arise in so direct 

 a way from conspicuous defects of human intelligence, that they may 

 be, more appropriately than the preceding ones, classed as subjective. 

 So regarding them, then, we have to beware, in the first place, of 

 this tendency to automorphic interpretation ; or rather, having no 

 alternative but to conceive the natures of other men in terms such as 

 our own feelings and ideas furnish, we have to beware of the errors 

 likely hence to arise discounting our conclusions as well as we can. 

 Further, Ave must be on our guard against the two opposite prevailing 

 errors respecting Man, and against the sociological errors arising from 

 them : we have to get rid of the two beliefs that human nature is un- 

 changeable, and that it is easily changed ; and we have, instead, to 

 become familiar with the conception of a human nature that is changed 

 in the slow succession of generations by social discipline. Another 

 obstacle not to be completely surmounted by any, and to be partially 

 surmounted by but few, is that resulting from the want of intellectual 

 faculty complex enough to grasp the extremely complex phenomena 

 which Sociology deals with. There can be no complete conception of 

 a sociological fact, considered as a component of Social Science, unless 

 there are present to thought all its essential factors ; and the power 

 of keeping them in mind with due clearness, as well as in their proper 

 proportions and combinations, has yet to be reached. Then beyond 

 this difficulty, only to be in a measure overcome, there is the further 

 difficulty, not, however, by any means so great, of enlarging the con- 

 ceptive capacity, so that it may admit the widely divergent and ex- 

 tremely various combinations of social phenomena. That rigidity of 

 conception produced in us by experiences of our own social life, in our 

 own time, has to be exchanged for a plasticity that can receive with 

 ease, and accept as natural, the countless different combinations of 

 social phenomena utterly unlike, and sometimes exactly opposite to, 

 those we are familiar with. Without such a plasticity there can be 

 no proper understanding of coexisting social states allied to our own, 

 still less of past social states, or social states of alien civilized races 

 and races in early stages of development. 







SPONTANEOUS MOVEMENTS IN PLANTS. 



By ALFRED W. BENNETT, M. A., B. So., F. L. S. 



THAT there are no "hard and fast lines" in Nature is a truth 

 which is more and more forcing itself upon the minds of men 

 of science. The older naturalists delighted to circumscribe their own 

 special domains within sharply-marked boundaries, which no trespass- 

 ers were allowed to pass. We have long given up the attempt thus 



