which the professions in general subserve. It is obvious that the medical man who removes pains, sets broken bones, cures diseases, and wards off premature death, increases the amount of life. Musical composers and performers, as well as professors of music and dancing, are agents who exalt the emotions and so increase life. The poet, epic, lyric or dramatic, along with the actor, severally in their respective ways yield pleasurable feelings and so increase life. The historian and the man of letters, to some extent by the guidance they furnish, but to a larger extent by the interest which their facts and fictions create, raise men's mental states and so increase life. Though we can not say of the lawyer that he does the like in a direct way, yet by aiding the citizen to resist aggressions he furthers his sustentation and thereby increases life. The multitudinous processes and appliances which the man of science makes possible, as well as the innumerable intellectual interests he arouses and the general illumination he yields, increase life. The teacher, alike by information given and by discipline enforced, enables his pupils more effectually to carry on this or that occupation and obtain better subsistence than they would else do, at the same time that he opens the doors to various special gratifications: in both ways increasing life. Once more, those who carry on the plastic arts—the painter, the sculptor, the architect—excite by their products pleasurable perceptions and emotions of the aesthetic class, and thus increase life.
In what way do the professions arise? From what pre-existing social tissue are they differentiated—to put the question in evolutionary language? Recognizing the general truth, variously illustrated in the preceding parts of this work [The Principles of Sociology], that all social structures result from specializations of a relatively homogeneous mass, our first inquiry must be—in which part of such mass do professional institutions originate.[1]
- ↑ When, more than twenty years ago, the first part of the Descriptive Sociology was issued, there appeared in a leading weekly journal, specially distinguished as the organ of university culture, a review of it, which, sympathetically written though it was, contained the following remark: "We are at a loss to understand why the column headed 'Professional,' and representing the progress of the secular learned professions. . . appears in the tables as a subdivision of 'Ecclesiastical.'"
The raising of this question shows how superficial is the historical culture ordinarily provided. In all probability the writer of the review knew all about the births, deaths, and marriages of our kings; had read the accounts of various peoples given by Herodotus; could have passed an examination in Thucydides; and besides acquaintance with Gibbon, probably had considerable knowledge of the wars carried on, and dynastic mutations suffered, by most European nations. Yet of a general law in the evolution of societies he was evidently ignorant—conspicuous though it is. For when attention is given, not to the gossip of history, but to the facts which are from time to time incidentally disclosed respecting the changes of social organizations; and when such changes exhibited in one society are
