138 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



through the transitions caused by continued growth and development. 

 The illogicalities and the absurdities to be found so abundantly in cur- 

 rent opinions and existing arrangements are those which inevitably 

 arise in the course of perpetual readjustments to circumstances per- 

 petually changing. Ideas and institutions proper to a past social 

 state, but incongruous with the new social state that has grown out 

 of it, surviving into this new social state they have made possible, and 

 disappearing only as this new social state establishes its own ideas and 

 institutions, are necessarily, during their survival, in conflict with 

 these new ideas and institutions — necessarily furnish elements of con- 

 tradiction in men's thoughts and deeds. And yet, as, for the carrying 

 on of social life, the old must continue so long as the new is not ready, 

 this perpetual compromise is an indispensable accompaniment of a 

 normal development. Its essentialness we may see on remembering 

 that it equally holds throughout the evolution of an individual organ- 

 ism. The structural and functional arrangements during growth are 

 never quite right: always the old adjustment for a smaller size is 

 made wrong by the larger size it has been instrumental in producing — 

 always the transition-structure is a compromise between the require- 

 ments of past and future, fulfilling in an imperfect way the require- 

 ments of the present. And this, which is shown clearly enough where 

 there is simple growth, is shown still more clearly where there are 

 metamorphoses. A creature which leads at two periods of its exist- 

 ence two different kinds of life, and which, in adaptation to its second 

 period, has to develop structures that were not fitted for its first, passes 

 through a stage during which it possesses both partially — during which 

 the old dwindles while the new grows : as happens, for instance, in 

 creatures that continue to breathe water by external branchiae during 

 the time they are developing the lungs that enable them to breathe 

 air. And thus it is with the changes produced by growth in socie- 

 ties, as well as with those metamorphoses accompanying change in 

 the mode of life — especially those accompanying change from the 

 predatory to the industrial life. Here, too, there must be transitional 

 stages during which incongruous organizations coexist : the first re- 

 maining indispensable until the second has grown up to its work. 

 Just as injurious as it would be to an amphibian to cut off its branchiae 

 before its lungs were well developed, so injurious must it be to a so- 

 ciety to destroy its old institutions before the new have become well- 

 organized enough to take their places. 



Non-recognition of this truth characterizes too much the reformers, 

 political, religious, and social, of our own time ; as it has characterized 

 those of past times. On the part of men eager to rectify wrongs and 

 expel errors, there is still, as there ever has been, so absorbing a con- 

 sciousness of the evils caused by old forms and old ideas, as to permit 

 no consciousness of the benefits these old forms and old ideas have 

 yielded. This partiality of view is, in a sense, necessary. There must 



