Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/444

428 all other sciences, has its three stages: 1. The facts of sociology are collected and recorded in chronicle and history. This is descriptive sociology. 2. These facts are reduced more or less successfully to general formal laws. This is philosophical history, or formal sociology. Thus far sociology is built upon its own basis of facts and phenomena; an analogical connection with biology may have been recognized, but not a scientific connection. 3. These formal laws are connected with and explained by the fundamental laws controlling organisms as their cause, and sociology becomes finally a causal science. In this, as in all other sciences, this last step is attended with prodigious impulse-and steady advance, for it is this last step which connects it with the hierarchy and gives it the assistance of all other sciences. It is this step which has only recently been made, and its effect is already visible.

But it will be again objected that society is already highly organized; how, then, can it be said that the science of social organization is of recent origin? How could the principles of social organization be embodied without a knowledge of those principles? The answer to this is quite plain, and brings to view an additional resemblance between society and other lower forms of organization. As the organic body passes from lower to higher and still higher forms without any will or consciousness or knowledge of the process on the part of the organism itself—or, still better, because more closely analogous to the social organism, as the organic kingdom, regarded as an organism, throughout all geological times developed into higher conditions without any intention on the part of the many individuals of which it is composed, but only as the natural result of each seeking its own ends in the struggle for life—even so society advances to more and more highly organized conditions without any intention on the part of the individual members, much less any knowledge of the principles of social organization, but purely as the natural result of the struggle for life, and each member seeking his own immediate ends. In both cases it is natural law working out its legitimate result. In both cases it is God (for natural law is the mode of Divine activity) working to a given end without the conscious coöperation of individuals. But there is this wide difference: In the latter case, if the development continues, there inevitably comes a time when man turns about and reflects upon what he has unconsciously or at least intuitively done: there eventually comes a time when he consciously cooperates with God or nature, and strives by the use of reason and science to modify and improve the social organism.

Or, regarding it from a slightly different point of view, the social organism is a work of art, the noblest of all arts. Now art always precedes science, and not the reverse, as many seem to suppose. It is fortunate that it is so, or emergence from barbarism would be impossible. The art of walking is acquired in great perfection before the principles of equilibrium involved are understood. Handspikes and pulleys and