SECTION 20. STUDIES PREPARATORY TO ALL INVESTIGATIONS. 157 



differences should be visible in at least many of the higher 

 animal species, which is decidedly not the fact, as Darwinians 

 themselves are at pains to demonstrate. 



68. Again. Scrutinise in this light Herbert Spencer's 

 thesis that "every kind of progress is from the homogeneous 

 to the heterogeneous". This interesting assumption he strives 

 to substantiate by adducing a liberal number of pertinent illustra- 

 tions in his essay "Progress: its Law and Cause". 1 Had metho- 

 dology been a recognised science in his day, he could never 

 have proceeded as he did. He would have automatically tested 

 his assumption by searching, as Darwin would have done, for 

 instances where the opposite tendency, that towards homo- 

 geneity, was expressive of progress, and generally applied 

 dialectical methods such as those incorporated in Conclusions 

 27 and 28. With but a modicum of labour he would have 

 accordingly reached the conclusion that his plausible thesis was 

 untenable and should be abandoned. For example. In our 

 generation integration has been a signal method of progress. 

 Speaking generally, the variety of meridians has been reduced 

 to one; a single gauge, in the place of the pre-existing multi- 

 tude of gauges, has been growingly favoured for railway tracks, 

 and a single universal keyboard for typewriters; screws and 

 numerous other industrial products have been standardised;- the 

 metric system has superseded the many local standards of mea- 

 surement in diverse countries, and bids fair to be universally 

 adopted; the standardising of Census and other statistics has 

 been suggested and partly realised;^ the rules of the sea and 

 those of warfare are each being gradually reduced to a single 

 system of rules; processes and methods of organisation are 

 coming to be standardised in industry and commerce generally ; 

 nations enter into compacts whereby numberless differences 

 bearing on international relations are abrogated and replaced 

 by uniform practices; scientific bodies are intermittently en- 

 gaged in elaborating international usages pertaining to their 

 special domain and also in coordinating endeavours ; the multi- 

 plicity of theories which erstwhile obtained is, in one depart- 

 ment after another, driven out of the field by a single one or 

 a modest few; comprehensive and unequivocal codes of law 



1 Essays, London, ed. 1907. 



- "The American Society of Automobile Engineers, finding that 1,100 sizes 

 of seamless steel tubes were being made, prevailed upon the manufacturers 

 to reduce the number to 160 ; again, finding that 600 sorts of lockwashers 

 were in use, they similarly reduced the number to 20." (M. and A. D. 

 McKillop, Efficiency Methods, 1917, pp. 60-61.) "A Government department 

 finds by classifying that 76 kinds of pennibs are used by its clerks; direct 

 economy and the simplification of storage follow by reducing these kinds 

 to seven or eight, with little or no inconvenience to anybody. A printing 

 plant finds, by classifying, that it has stocked 200 types of paper, whereas 

 85 will cover all possible needs." (Ibid., p. 64.) 



; Patrick Geddes, The Classification of Statistics and its Results, Edin- 

 burgh, 1881. 



