Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/115

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served, between political and industrial functions, which fall to distinct classes: now a man is a merchant in the morning and a legislator at night; in mercantile business one year, and the next, perhaps, head of the navy, like Mr. Goschen or Mr. W. H. Smith." Nothing contained in this volume explains the seeming anomaly here exemplified; but any one who turns to a chapter in the second part of the "Principles of Sociology," entitled "Social Types and Metamorphoses," will there find a clew to the explanation of it, and will see that it is a phenomenon consequent on the progressing dissolution of one type and evolution of another. The doctrine of evolution, currently-regarded as referring only to the development of species, is erroneously supposed to imply some intrinsic proclivity in every species toward a higher form; and, similarly, a majority of readers make the erroneous assumption that the transformation which constitutes evolution, in its wider sense, implies an intrinsic tendency to go through those changes which the formula of evolution expresses. But all who have fully grasped the argument of this work will see that the process of evolution is not necessary, but depends on conditions; and that the prevalence of it in the universe around is consequent on the prevalence of these conditions: the frequent occurrence of dissolution showing us that, where the conditions are not maintained, the reverse process is quite as readily gone through. Bearing in mind this truth, we shall be prepared to find that the progress of a social organism toward more heterogeneous and more definite structures of a certain type continues only as long as the actions which produce these effects continue in play. We shall expect that, if these actions cease, the progressing transformation will cease. We shall infer that the particular structures which have been formed by the activities carried on will not grow more heterogeneous and more definite; and that if other orders of activities, implying other sets of forces, commence, answering structures of another kind will begin to make their appearance, to grow more heterogeneous and definite, and to replace the first. And it will be manifest that while the transition is going on—while the first structures are dissolving and the second evolving—there must be a mixture of structures causing apparent confusion of traits. Just as during the metamorphoses of an animal which, having during its earlier existence led one kind of life, has to develop structures fitting it for another kind of life, there must occur a blurring of the old organization while the new organization is becoming distinct, leading to transitory anomalies of structure, so, during the metamorphoses undergone by a society in which the militant activities and structures are dwindling while the industrial are growing, the old and new arrangements must be mingled in a perplexing way. On reading the chapter in the "Principles of Sociology" which I have named, Mr. Leslie will see that the above facts referred to by him are interpretable as consequent on the transition from that type of regulative organization proper to militant life to that type of regulative organization