Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/19

 Rh different from its real direction, and sometimes, as when a fish is seen in the water, its apparent place is so far from its real place, that great misconception results unless large allowance is made for refraction; but sociological observations are not thus falsified: through the daily press light comes without any bending of its rays, and in studying past ages it is easy to make allowance for the refraction due to the historic medium.

The motions of gases, though they conform to mechanical laws which are well understood, are nevertheless so involved, that the art of controlling currents of air in a house is not yet mastered; but the waves and currents of feeling running through a society, and the consequent directions and amounts of social activities, may be readily known beforehand.

Though molecules of inorganic substances are very simple, yet prolonged study is required to understand their modes of behavior to one another, and even the most instructed frequently meet with interactions of them producing consequences they never anticipated; but, where the interacting bodies are not molecules but living beings of highly-complex natures, it is easy to foresee all results which will arise. Physical phenomena are so connected that, between seeming probability and actual truth, there is apt to be a wide difference, even where but two bodies are acting: instance the natural supposition that during our northern summer the Earth is nearer to the Sun than during the winter, which is just the reverse of the fact; but among sociological phenomena, where the bodies are so multitudinous, and the forces by which they act on one another so many, and so multiform, and so variable, the probability and the actuality will naturally correspond.

Matter often behaves paradoxically, as when two cold liquids added together become boiling hot, as when the mixing of two clear liquids produces an opaque mud, or as when water immersed in sulphurous acid freezes on a hot iron plate; but what we distinguish as Mind, especially when massed together in the way which causes social action, evolves no paradoxical results—always such results come from it as seem likely to come.

The acceptance of contradictions like these, tacitly implied in the beliefs of the scientifically cultivated, is the more remarkable when we consider how abundant are the proofs that human nature is difficult to manipulate; that methods apparently the most rational disappoint expectation; and that the best results frequently arise from courses which common-sense thinks unpractical. Even individual human nature shows us these startling anomalies. A man of leisure is the man naturally fixed upon, if something has to be done; but your man of leisure cannot find time, and the man to be trusted to do what is wanted, is the man who is already busy. The boy who studies longest will learn the most, and a man will become wise in proportion as he reads much, are propositions which look true but are quite