COLLATERAL READINGS SUGGESTED IN CONNECTION WITH ESSAY IX. Spencers's Principles of Sociology, Descriptive Sociology, and Social Statics; Tylor's Early History of Mankind; Coulange's Ancient City; Maine's Ancient Law, and Early Law and Customs; Keary's Dawn of History; Force's Prehistoric Man; Lubbock's Primitive Condition of Man, and Origin of Civilization; Clodd's Childhood of the World; Bagehot's Physics and Politics; Morris's The Aryan Race: Its Origin and Achievements; James Cotter Mor-ison's The Service of Man. EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY.* EITHER prospectively or immediately, the central figure in each one of the topics of the essays of this course upon Evolution is Man; and in its full scope, in the topic of this evening, the central figure is Associated Man, in process of evolution as such, in the presence and under the influence of earlier and rudimentary forms or types of societary association found in vegetal and animal life generally. The largeness, complexity, and, in its early stages and history, the obscurity of the subject, therefore become evident at a glance. The experience of the Master himself illustrates the difficulties to be met with in its treatment. Whether or not it be true, as we suspect, that Mr. Spencer found in it the initial impulses that led to the working out of his system of philosophy, it is evident that all his previously written books lead naturally and inevitably up to those he has written on the subject of Sociology. And yet on reaching that branch of his system, in due course, he found himself practically forced to prepare a special and preliminary work on the "study" of it, devoted substantially to an extended examination and explanation of the almost insurmountable obstacles and hindrances to be met with in presenting and in understanding it. Comprehensively, at the outset, he describes the entire. objective and subjective worlds as fairly barricaded with them; and subsequently, descending to particulars, he presents and describes, through some hundreds of pages, like so many specimen grains of sand taken from an ocean beach, samples of "bias," with which the human mind is infested, such as the educational, the patriotic, the class, the political, and finally, worst of all, the theological bias, all of which interfere with the proper study and comprehension of the subject. He then occupies nearly one hundred additional pages in setting forth the "discipline," the "preparation in biology" and "psychology" required for the proper study, * COPYRIGHT, 1889, by The New Ideal Publishing Co. ending with a "conclusion," and, in later editions, a "postscript" of some forty pages more. And when the end of the book is reached, the wonder of it all is, that he did not write finis, and drop the subject then and there forever. That he did not do so, is one of the many marks of his imperial genius. In the preface to Part II, Vol. II, Principles of Sociology, Mr. Spencer says in substance that the full and satisfactory treatment of political evolution alone "would require the labors of a life," and that he therefore limits himself to broad generalization, believing it to be "supremely important and that no one part can be fully understood without it." But even he, treating the subject in this manner, has only been able to stagger on without going through, or completing it, and seems now to have fallen exhausted by the wayside, leaving his work in this branch unfinished, and, as we fear, never to be finished by him. No further excuse need be offered for the various limitations of this essay. However, let any one sitting down now to prepare a sociological essay glance at the bibliography of the subject, and he will find that the work already done by Mr. Spencer has stimulated scores if not hundreds of able thinkers and writers into activity, as well as many others whose writings may at least have the effect and merit of arousing the attention of some minds that would not otherwise be reached and influenced. Certainly any one interested in sociology, on looking into the books already on library shelves, and noting the yearly procession of them on the march to that position of influence, must be greatly encouraged by the rapid spread of evolution views in the sociological branch of the subject. Whether Evolution has yet furnished us with completely satisfactory solutions and remedies, or not, it has certainly rendered us a great service in disclosing some of the abysses directly under our feet; and particularly by more than warning us that the dark ages are not necessarily all behind us. Especially in America it has done us a valuable service in developing a well-founded and healthy distrust in the wisdom of many of the old leaders and systems, and in preparing us to at least judiciously hope for, if not expect, the eventual coming of a better day. Particularly, it has aided other helps to knowledge, in assisting the suppression of the provincial bombast and self-sufficiency of the Fourth of July orations of the past and the early part of the present generation, with many of their implications, and also in showing us that our institutions have a solid support in a true science of society. Many prior attempts had been made, with more or less of mingled failure and success, to reduce social chaos to order and system. Significantly, the dominant civilization of the modern world, and as we hope of the future, is based on the teaching found in what is claimed to be a sacred book, which opens the history of the world as beginning in a state of chaos, out of which the wonderful order and harmony of the celestial spheres were slowly developed under the control of a Supreme Power. In the concluding division of the same book, dealing with mankind born into a world as the product of this Supreme Power, the highest point is reached while dealing with fundamental social principles almost exclusively-religious worship being relegated to the closet, and there dominated by social duty— in the appeal of prayer to the same Power, containing the words: "Our Father which art in heaven. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth as in heaven." Evolutionary Sociology not only follows the first example so set, by finding its fundamental principles in and through a study of the prior celestial chaos and its methods. of reduction to cosmos, but it also follows at no great remove the remaining parts of that early account of creation as it deals with the development of vegetal, animal and human life on this globe-substituting only the slow-working principle of evolution for the quick-working assumption of creation, and reducing all of it to an orderly, scientific system; and it also follows the later inspiration in applying the evolutionary principles found at work in the heavens, to the reduction of social chaos to beneficent order and harmony, insisting always and everywhere on their universality and omnipotence, both in the kingdom of heaven and in the kingdoms of the earth. So doing and so doing throughout it is impossible for us to believe that the sacred book and the evolution philosophy can be found in serious conflict; and we are compelled to believe that they will, when properly understood and interpreted, be found in substantial harmony. In the heavens, order arises out of seeming disorder, through the necessary development and developmental |
