flO COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. il 



thing like national or even civic organization, each family 

 chief was a monarch in miniature, uniting in his own person 

 the functions of king, priest, judge, and parliament ; yet he 

 was scarcely less a digger and hewer than his subject children, 

 wives, and brethren. Commercially, it is needless to say, all 

 primitive communities are homogeneous. In any barbarous 

 tribe the number of different employments is very limited, 

 and such as there are may be undertaken indiscriminately 

 by everyone. Every man is his own butcher and baker, his 

 own tailor and carpenter, his own smith, and his own weapon 

 maker. Now the progress of such a society toward a civi- 

 lized condition begins with the differentiation and integration 

 of productive occupations. That each specialization of labour 

 entails increased efficiency of production, which reacting 

 brings out still greater specialization, is known to every tyro 

 in political economy. Nor is it less obvious that, with the 

 advance of civilization, labour has been steadily increasing 

 in coherent heterogeneity, not only with regard to its division 

 %mong different sets of mutually-dependent labourers, but 

 also with regard to its processes, and even its instruments. 

 The distinguishing characteristic of modern machinery, as 

 compared with the rude tools of the Middle Ages or the 

 clumsy apparatus of the ancients, is its definite heterogeneity. 

 The contrast between the steam-engine of to-day and the 

 pulleys, screws, and levers of a thousand years ago assures us 

 that the growing complexity of the objects which labour aims 

 at is paralleled by the growing complexity of the modes of 

 attaining them. Turning to government, we see that by dif- 

 ferentiation in the primeval community some families acquired 

 supreme power, while others sank, though in different degrees, 

 to the rank of subjects. The integration of allied families into 

 tribes, and of adjacent tribes into nations, as well as that kind 

 of integra.tion exhibited at a later date in the closely-knit 

 diplomatic inter-relations of different countries, are marked 

 steps m social progress. Next may be mentioned the differ* 



