604 COMPARATIVE SOCIOLOGY. 



ed by each individual exhibiting it spontaneously, without experience 

 or imitation. The suggestions of instinct are often instantaneous and 

 always unvarying ; those of reason involve deliberation, and into them 

 the element of time enters. They also involve error. Animals which, 

 for a thousand years, nay, indeed, through all time, have never invented, 

 never improved, never varied, all of the same kind being equally skill- 

 ful, are to be considered as actuated by instinct, not by reason. Those 

 of which it may be said that they perceive, remember, think, compare, 

 and then form a judgment, are to be considered as possessing reason, and 

 this the more as they the more perfectly accomplish that end. In this 

 respect, man is approached by the quadrumana, the elephant, the. dog, 

 but the immense interval which separates him from them is at once in- 

 dicated by the fact that they appreciate only good and evil, so far as in- 

 volved in pleasure and pain ; but he contemplates equally the good, the 

 beautiful, and the true. 



The historian may perhaps view with resentment an attempt on the 

 Connection of P art ^ P n y s ilgi sts * accomplish the annexation of the ter- 

 history and ritory in which he labors. With difficulty will he be brought 

 physiology. ^ o a j m ' t fae dogma that the history of men and of nations 

 is only a chapter of physiology. He doubtless will smile at the absurd- 

 ities of a doctrine which places under a common point of view the doings 

 of caterpillars, ants, and wasps, with the high resolves of senates and 

 emperors which undertakes to consider how, out of the most obscure, 

 the most august may proceed. 



But it is none the less true that there exists a comparative sociology, 

 as well as a comparative anatomy and a comparative physiology. Struc- 

 ture, function, and career are all inseparably connected. 



When we were considering, in a former chapter, the nervous mechan- 

 ism of insects, we saw how that, from the purely automatic, the volun- 

 tary is gradually produced by the development on the ventral cord of an 

 apparatus for the registry of impressions, the cephalic ganglia. These 

 registered impressions are the cause of the most surprising psychical re- 

 sults. 



The action of barbarian communities is as purely automatic as the ac- 

 Barbarism and tion of an insect, which never had, or from which there have 

 civilization. k een rem oved, the registering ganglia. Irritate the decap- 

 itated wasp, it will sting. The uninjured wasp has a choice of action ; 

 it may possibly fly away. The action of civilized communities is of a 

 far higher kind : they are guided in what they do by experience. In the 

 progress of civilization there have arisen the means of permanently re- 

 cording past events. Such records influence us in deciding how we shall 

 act. They constitute knowledge. 



If we may compare small things with great, is there not an analogy 



