en. xviii.] THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY. 211 



entiation of the governing power into the civil and the eccle 

 siastical; while by the side of these ceremonial government 

 grows up insensibly as a third power, regulating the minor 

 details of social intercourse none the less potently because 

 not embodied in statutes and edicts. Comparing the priests 

 and augurs of antiquity with the dignitaries of the mediaeval 

 Church, the much greater heterogeneity of the latter system 

 becomes manifest. Civil government likewise has become 

 differentiated into executive, legislative, and judicial. Exe 

 cutive government has been divided into many branches, and 

 diversely in different nations. A comparison of the Athenian 

 popular government with the representative systems o: the 

 present day shows that the legislative function has no more 

 than any of the others preserved its original homogeneity. 

 While the contrast between the Aula JRegis of the Norman 

 kings and the courts of common law, equity, and admiralty, 

 county courts, queen s courts, state courts, and federal 

 courts, which are lineally descended from it, tells us the 

 same story concerning the judicial power. Nor should it be 

 forgotten that the steady expansion of legal systems, to meet 

 the exigencies which civilization renders daily more complex, 

 is an advance from relatively indefinite homogeneity to 

 relatively definite heterogeneity. 



Obviously, however, our task is not completed when we 

 have pointed out this general coincidence between the 

 development of society and the development of life. Nor 

 can the universal law here illustrated be the special law of 

 social progress for wiiich we are seeking. By reason of its 

 very comprehensiveness, the law of universal evolution 

 cannot be regarded as supplying the precise kind of in 

 formation we desire concerning the relations of social to 

 organic phenomena. By its aid we have found it possible 

 to interpret not only the development of life, intelligence, 

 and society, but also the genesis of planetary systems and 

 he evolution of the earth. It is therefore the law not only 



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