8o8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



things and individuals in society and viewing it as a wbole. The 

 aggregate of those hundred thousands or millions of men which we 

 call a people, a nation, or a society, forms, when regarded as if from 

 without, a higher unit, in which the willing, transitory individual disap- 

 pears and no longer exerts a disturbing influence on the observation 

 of the great average. The society as an organization, not the indi- 

 viduals in themselves, is thus the object of social physiology. We 

 can give such descriptions of society as a whole, of its structure, form, 

 connections, and other peculiarities, as the mineralogist or the chemist, 

 the botanist or zoologist gives of matter and plants and animals ; 

 which are just and useful for a time, and form the descriptive or ana- 

 omical part. We can, too, further observe the organic functions of 

 society as such, and deduce laws of cause and effect which are also 

 available for a time as physiological laws — for a time, but not for 

 always ; for, quite in accord with more recent natural research, which 

 endures no pause, but is always in movement and in a state of evolu- 

 tion, is a constant process of change exhibited in the circumstances of 

 human society, without our meeting, on account of it, any contradic- 

 tion with the principles from which we may have started. 



We may describe social phenomena as vital and physical, and as 

 ethical and psychical. 



In order to obtain a proper position for deducing the general laws 

 of social phenomena, it is necessary to overlook for the moment all 

 concrete personality or individuality, and to regard, say, all the forty- 

 five million inhabitants of the German Empire, or all the Germans in 

 Europe, only as parts of a great whole, of a grand aggregate, describ- 

 able under the name of a social body. We must imagine these men 

 as in so close a reciprocal connection that, like the cells of a plant or 

 animal, we can not conceive them as dismembered, but must regard 

 them as forming by their union a single organism, a society, or a 

 state. As in plants and animals each group of cells has its particular 

 functional distinction, so here we meet groups of men among the 

 millions constituting the whole, performing different parts in the 

 common structure. One group will be engaged in material labors, 

 another in the intellectual labors of religion and instruction ; others in 

 pursuits of art, science, jurisprudence, law, or the esthetic development 

 of the organism, and so on in an infinite diversity of adaptations, as 

 among the parts of single living beings. Such a vision could be ob- 

 tained in perfection if, as Huxley has imagined, one were an inhabit- 

 ant of another planet, come to take a view of the whole earth and its 

 inhabitants from some convenient distance where he could include the 

 whole at a single glance. As we approach the realization of such a 

 view, w^e gain a marvelous comprehension of the rcgulai'ity of the 

 types of masses of men, and of their normal composition and common 

 properties. Take the sexual division of mankind. Although over 

 the whole earth a general equality in the numbers of the two sexes 



