EVOLUTION AND SOCIOLOGY 59 



a beginning of an end ; in every process a key to 

 the single step to be taken next. The full corn is 

 not in the ear, but the first cell of it is, and 

 though ' it doth not yet appear ' what the million- 

 celled ear shall be, there is rational ground for 

 judging what the second cell shall be. The next 

 few cells of the Social Organism are all that are 

 given to Sociology to affect. And, in dealing with 

 them, its business is with the forces; the pheno- 

 mena will take care of themselves. Neither the 

 great forces of Nature, nor the great lines of Nature, 

 change in a day, and however apparently unrelated 

 seem the phenomena as we ascend — here animal, 

 there human ; at one time non-moral, at another 

 moral — the lines of progress are the same. Nature, 

 in horizontal section, is broken up into strata which 

 present to the eye of ethical Man the profoundest 

 distinctions in the universe; but Nature in the 

 vertical section offers no break, or pause, or flaw. 

 To study the first is to study a hundred unrelated 

 sciences, sciences of atoms, sciences of cells, sciences 

 of Souls, sciences of Societies ; to study the second 

 is to deal with one science — Evolution. Here, on 

 the horizontal section, may be what Geology calls 

 an unconformability ; there is overlap ; changes of 

 climate may be registered from time to time, 

 each with its appropriate reaction on the things 



