PROFESSIONS IN GENERAL. 181 



the sculptor, the architect excite by their products pleasur 

 able perceptions and emotions of the aesthetic class, and thus 

 increase life. 



662. In what way do the professions arise? From 

 what pre-existing social tissue are they differentiated to 

 put the question in evolutionary language? Eecognizing 

 the general truth, variously illustrated in the preceding 

 parts of this work, that all social structures result from spe 

 cializations of a relatively homogeneous mass, our first in 

 quiry must be in which part of such mass do professional 

 institutions originate.* 



Stated in a definite form the reply is that traces of the 

 professional agencies, or some of them, arise in the primi 

 tive politico-ecclesiastical agency; and that as fast as this 

 becomes divided into the political and the ecclesiastical, the 

 ecclesiastical more especially carries with it the germs of the 

 professional, and eventually develops them. Remember 

 ing that in the earliest social groups there is temporary 



* When, more than twenty years ago, the first part of the Descriptive 

 Sociology was issued, there appeared in a leading weekly journal, specially 

 distinguished as the organ of university culture, a review of it, which, sympa 

 thetically written though it was, contained the following remark : &quot; We are 

 at a loss to understand why the column headed * Professional, and represent 

 ing the progress of the secular learned professions . . . appears in the tables 

 as a subdivision of * Ecclesiastical. &quot; 



The raising of this question shows how superficial is the historical culture 

 ordinarily provided. In all probability the writer of the review knew all 

 about the births, deaths, and marriages of our kings ; had read the accounts 

 of various peoples given by Herodotus ; could have passed an examination in 

 Thucydides ; and besides acquaintance \rith Gibbon, probably had consider 

 able knowledge of the wars carried on, and dynastic mutations, suffered, by 

 most European nations. Yet of a general law in the evolution of societies 

 he was evidently ignorant conspicuous though it is. For when attention 

 is given, not to the gossip of history, but to the facts which are from time to 

 time incidentally disclosed respecting the changes of social organisations ; and 

 when such changes exhibited in one society are compared with those exhibited 

 in other societies ; the truth that the various professional agencies are de 

 rived from the ecclesiatical agency, is one which &quot; leaps to the eyes,&quot; as the 

 French say. 



