2 THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 



If we have learnt, it may be indirectly, from the writ- 

 ings of Darwin that the methods of production, the mode 

 of holding property, the forms of marriage, the organisa- 

 tions of the family and of the commune are the essential 

 factors which the historian has to tface in the growth of 

 human society ; if in our history books we are ceasing to 

 head periods with the names of monarchs and to devote 

 whole paragraphs to their mistresses, still we are far indeed 

 from clearly grasping the exact interaction of the various 

 factors of social evolution, or from understanding why one 

 becomes predominant at this or that epoch. We can 

 indeed note periods of great social activity and others of 

 apparent quiescence, but it is probably only our ignorance 

 of the exact course of social evolution which leads us to 

 assign fundamental changes in social institutions either to 

 individual men or to reformations and revolutions. We 

 associate, it is true, the German Reformation with a re- 

 placement of collectivist by individualist standards, not 

 only in religion but also in handicraft, art, and politics. 

 The French Revolution in like manner is the epoch from 

 which many are inclined to date the rebirth of those social 

 ideas which have largely remoulded the mediaeval relations 

 of class and caste, relations little affected by the sixteenth- 

 century Reformation. Coming somewhat nearer to our 

 own time we can indeed measure with some degree of 

 accuracy the social influence of the great changes in the 

 methods of production, the transition from home to 

 capitalistic industry, which transformed English life in the 

 first half of this century, and has since made its way 

 throughout the civilised world. But when we actually 

 reach our own age, an age one of the most marked 

 features of which is the startlingly rapid growth of the 

 natural sciences and their far-reaching influence on the 

 standards of both the comfort and the conduct of human 

 life, we find it impossible to compress its social history 

 into the bald phrases by which we attempt to connote 

 the characteristics of more distant historical epochs. 



It is very difficult for us who live in the last years of 

 the nineteenth century to rightly measure the relative im- 



