THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. 613 



Sociology. Enough has been said in proof of that which was to be 

 shown the need for biological study as a preparation for grasping 

 sociological truths. 



The effect to be looked for from it is, that of giving strength and 

 clearness to convictions otherwise feeble and vague. Sundry of the 

 doctrines I have presented under their biological aspects are doctrines 

 admitted in considerable degrees. Such acquaintance with the laws 

 of life as they have gathered incidentally, lead many to suspect that 

 appliances for preserving the physically-feeble bring results that are 

 not wholly good. Others there are who occasionally get glimpses of 

 evils caused by fostering the reckless and the stupid. But their sus- 

 picions and qualms fail to determine their conduct, because the inevi- 

 tableness of the bad consequences has not been made adequately clear 

 by the study of Biology at large. When countless illustrations have 

 shown them that all strength, all faculty, all fitness, presented by 

 every living thing, has arisen partly by a growth of each power con- 

 sequent on exercise of it, and partly by the more frequent survival 

 and greater multiplication of the better-endowed individuals, en- 

 tailing gradual disappearance of the worse-endoAved when it is 

 seen that all perfection, bodily and mental, has been achieved through 

 this process, and that suspension of it must cause cessation of 

 progress, while reversal of it would bring universal decay when 

 it is seen that the mischiefs entailed by disregard of these truths, 

 though they may be slow, are certain there comes a conviction that 

 social policy must be conformed to them, and that to ignore them is 

 madness. 



Did not experience prepare one to find everywhere a degree of 

 irrationality remarkable in beings who distinguish themselves as 

 rational, one might have assumed that, before devising modes of deal- 

 ing with citizens in their corporate relations, special attention would 

 be given to the natures of these citizens individually considered, and 

 by implication to the natures of living things at large. Put a carpen- 

 ter into a blacksmith's shop, and set him to forge, to weld, to harden, 

 to anneal, etc., and he will not need the blacksmith's jeers, to show 

 him how foolish is the attempt to make and mend tools before he has 

 learned the properties of iron. Let the carpenter challenge the black- 

 smith, who knows little about wood in general and nothing about par- 

 ticular kinds of wood, to do his work, and, unless the blacksmith 

 declines to make himself a laughing-stock, he is pretty certain to saw 

 askew, to choke up his plane, and presently to break his tools or cut 

 his fingers. But, while every one sees the folly of supposing that wood 

 or iron can be shaped and fitted, without an apprenticeship during 

 which their ways of behaving are made familiar, no one sees any 

 folly in undertaking to devise institutions, and to shape human nature 

 in this way or that way, without a preliminary study of Man, and of 

 Life in general as explaining Man's life. For simple functions we in- 



