Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/468

450 On the other hand, the remaining divisions of the work have, in the writing, undergone unlooked-for expansion; the three bulky volumes now before us containing, in addition to nearly six hundred pages setting forth data and inductions, elaborate treatises on domestic, ceremonial, political, ecclesiastical, professional, and industrial institutions, their genesis, growth, characteristics, significance, and probable future developments.

Of the direct bearings of these volumes upon the urgent problems of modern social life, this is, unfortunately, not the place to speak; though we may note in passing that here, as elsewhere, the Spencerian philosophy reveals its eminently practical qualities. No matter to what profound depths its arguments may take us, its doctrines relate themselves at every point with vital issues, and thus, in Lord Bacon's phrase, come home to men's business and bosoms. We feel, in following its speculations, that, remote and labyrinthine as these must necessarily sometimes seem to be, we are never, after all, very far away from the broad highway of human affairs. But if we must not now dwell upon this particular point, still less must we allow ourselves, in connection with it, to be drawn off into any discussion of Mr. Spencer's individualism. We must confine ourselves to the merest statement of the purpose of the Sociology, taken as a whole.

Such purpose is, of course, in a word, the interpretation of the phenomena of social growth and organization, from the simplest to the most intricate, in terms of universal evolution. Societies are organisms—evolving aggregates; and their progress is clearly marked by even greater and greater multiformity in unity—that is, by gradual advance from the comparative homogeneity, indefiniteness, and incoherence of the simple tribe, to the constantly increasing heterogeneity, definiteness, and coherence of the civilized nation. To work out this continuous process of integration and differentiation along the great lines of social structure and function; to make clear that the transformations everywhere going on, from the minutest change in a tribal group to the far-reaching metamorphoses of modern civilization, are at bottom exemplifications of the ultimate laws of evolution; and to show that the complex play of forces in the superorganic, no less than in the organic, world tends inevitably toward equilibration; in such a general consensus of results, then, the various detailed portions of the Sociology all merge; in such a consensus the