Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 4.djvu/150

138 through the transitions caused by continued growth and development. The illogicalities and the absurdities to be found so abundantly in current opinions and existing arrangements are those which inevitably arise in the course of perpetual readjustments to circumstances perpetually 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 contradiction 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 organism. 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 requirements of past and future, fulfilling in an imperfect way the requirements 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 existence 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 branchiæ 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 societies, 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 remaining indispensable until the second has grown up to its work. Just as injurious as it would be to an amphibian to cut off its branchiæ before its lungs were well developed, so injurious must it be to a society 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 consciousness 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