428 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



all other sciences, has its three stages : 1. The facts of sociology are 

 collected and recorded in chronicle and history. This is descriptive 

 sociology. 2. These facts are reduced more or less successfully to gen- 

 eral formal laws. This is philosophical history, or formal sociology. 

 Thus far sociology is built upon its own basis of facts and phenomena ; 

 an analogical connection with biology may have been recognized, but 

 not a scientific connection. 3. These formal laws are connected with 

 and explained by the fundamental laws controlling organisms as their 

 cause, and sociology becomes finally a causal science. In this, as in all 

 other sciences, this last step is attended with prodigious impulse -and 

 steady advance, for it is this last step which connects it with the 

 hierarchy and gives it the assistance of all other sciences. It is this 

 step which has only recently been made, and its effect is already 

 visible. 



But it will be again objected that society is already highly organized ; 

 how, then, can it be said that the science of social organization is of recent 

 origin? How could the principles of social organization be embodied 

 without a knowledge of those principles? The answer to this is quite 

 plain, and brings to view an additional resemblance between society 

 and other lower forms of organization. As the organic body passes from 

 lower to higher and still higher forms without any will or consciousness 

 or knowledge of the process on the part of the organism itself — or, still 

 better, because more closely analogous to the social organism, as the 

 organic kingdom, regarded as an organism, throughout all geological 

 times developed into higher conditions without any intention on the 

 part of the many individuals of which it is composed, but only as the 

 natural result of each seeking its own ends in the struggle for life — even 

 so society advances to more and more highly organized conditions with- 

 out any intention on the part of the individual members, much less any 

 knowledge of the principles of social organization, but purely as the 

 natural result of the struggle for life, and each member seeking his own 

 immediate ends. In both cases it is natural law working out its legiti- 

 mate result. In both cases it is God (for natural law is the mode of 

 Divine activity) working to a given end without the conscious coopera- 

 tion of individuals. But there is this wide difference : In the latter 

 case, if the development continues, there inevitably comes a time when 

 man turns about and reflects upon what he has imconsciously or at least 

 intuitively done : there eventually comes a time when he consciously 

 cooperates with God or nature, and strives by the use of reason and 

 science to modify and improve the social organism. 



Or, regarding it from a slightly different point of view, the social 

 organism is a work of art, the noblest of all arts. Now art always pre- 

 cedes science, and not the reverse, as many seem to suppose. It is for- 

 tunate that it is so, or emergence from barbarism would be impossible. 

 The art of walking is acquired in great perfection before the principles 

 of equilibrium involved are understood. Handspikes and pulleys and 



