Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/521

Rh muscles move like the snap of a steel trap, no one would ever be burned in those cases where freedom of bodily motion was possible. Thus the slowness of these processes resulting in injury to the body is, from the physicist's standpoint, a defect, but it exists because the nature of the matter out of which the man is built puts an undesirable limit to the intensity of action.

If we leave now the consideration of the static properties of matter, and view it in its dynamic aspect, we encounter a generalization of the widest significance. The most notable thing about the universe is that it is the scene of incessant change. Absolute stability is unknown; no single thing living or nonliving is exactly the same for two consecutive hours. Even those phenomena which stand as types of the permanent, the revolution of the earth and the position of the stars, are now known to be undergoing changes which, though exceedingly slow, are nevertheless constant and ever progressing toward some future condition whose character we know not, but which we are certain will be as fleeting and transitory as the present.

If "all our yesterdays have lit the way to dusty death," then is it not also equally true that all our to-morrows will usher in new and unknown forms of resurrection?—for, I take it, the material universe of stars and planets, the great globe of the earth, the movements of matter and the sequences of life, all tell one impressive story, which is, that to undergo change, endless change, is the sentence pronounced on everything built of matter and having its share of the universal motion around us.

But while there seems no escape from the above conclusion, there is another generalization equally great, which is its supplement; this is, that the changes are not chaotic: everywhere there are method, rule, law; and these laws, as we interpret them, are the unchangeable elements of the universe. The method by which a given result is produced is not exhausted by that result. The rule that all living things must die will still remain unimpaired when the last man shall have sunk into his grave. The law that all things shall change is itself enforced and executed by that change, so that it remains permanent while the forms and agglomerations of matter are fleeting.

Now, the purpose of this paper, to which the above is a peroration rather than an argument, is to show that social changes, like other mutations, are governed by law. The discovery of these laws will constitute the science of sociology, just as in nonliving things the same kind of study is called physics or chemistry. The application of these laws will give us an art of sociology, very much as pure science finally culminates in engineering or medicine.

Religion excepted, the study of sociology as a pure science