The Nature of Society 73 



sciences to a yet greater degree, experience a 

 fanciful and idealistic infancy. To secure co- 

 operative action the evil spirits, or ideas, of 

 hatred and murder had to be driven out, or 

 at least pacified to a serviceable rivalry. This 

 end was attained in the primitive clan by 

 various rites of exorcism and invocation of 

 spirit aid. The common fear of unchained 

 passion and of nature, made vivid by incan- 

 tation, rite, and legend, created a pressure that 

 held men to the ways experience had proved, 

 while prophet and seer inspired to cooperative 

 effort through their imaginative interpreta- 

 tions of life. Prophetic vision accumulates 

 as literature, and struggles for existence in 

 custom and law. But though vision has at- 

 tained the sublime heights of the gospels, yet 

 the practical application in social control can 

 hardly be said as yet to have reached a logical 

 stage, politics and law being complex conven- 

 tionalities rather than sciences. While there 

 are indications in expert industrial manage- 

 ment and in social legislation that a scientific 

 stage is coming, yet the world contains in its 

 international community of trade and thought 

 only the crude beginnings of that universal 

 reign of righteousness which has been the 



