APPENDIX. 



591 



lative principles being in essentials the same everywhere, it 

 results that systems of Law acquire certain general similarities 

 as the most developed social life is approached. 



These special replies to Mr. Leslie's objections are, how- 

 ever, but introductory to the general reply; which would be, 

 I think, adequate even in their absence. Mr. Leslie's method 

 is that of taking detached groups of social phenomena, as those 

 of language, of fashion, of trade, and arguing (though as I 

 have sought to show, not effectually) that their later trans- 

 formations do not harmonize with the alleged general law of 

 Evolution. But the real question is, not whether we find ad- 

 vance to a more definite coherent heterogeneity in these taken 

 separately, but whether we find this advance in the structures 

 and actions of the entire society. Even were it true that the 

 law does not hold in certain orders of social processes and pro- 

 ducts, it would not follow that it does not hold of social pro- 

 cesses and products in their totality. The law is a law of the 

 transformation of aggregates; and must be tested by the 

 entire assemblages of phenomena which the aggregate present. 

 Omitting societies in states of decay and dissolution, which 

 exhibit the converse change, and contemplating only socie- 

 ties which are growing, Mr. Leslie will, I think, scarcely allege 

 of any one of them that its structures and functions do not, 

 taken altogether, exhibit increasing heterogeneity. And if, 

 instead of taking each society as an aggregate, he takes the 

 entire aggregate of societies which the Earth supports, from 

 primitive hordes up to highly civilized nations, he will scarcely 

 deny that this entire aggregate has been becoming more various 

 in the forms of societies it includes, and is still becoming more 

 various. 



Criticism would be greatly diminished in bulk if there 

 were excluded from it all that part devoted to disproving 

 statements which have not been made; and were this course 

 pursued, the work On Mr. Spencer's Formula of Evolution, 

 by Malcolm Guthrie, would disappear bodily. It is little else 

 than a mis-statement of certain fundamental views of mine, 

 and then an elaborate refutation of the views as mis-stated. 



Let me first show by brief extracts from First Principles 

 what these views are. In a chapter on " Ultimate Scientific 

 Ideas," after showing how the hypothesis that matter consists 

 of solid atoms commits us to alternative impossibilities of 

 thought, I have shown how the hypothesis of Boscovich, that 



