That measuring other person's actions by the standards our own thoughts and feelings furnish, often causes misconstruc tion, is a remark familiar even to the vulgar. But while among members of the same society, having natures nearly akin, it is seen that automorphic explanations are often er roneous, it is not seen with due clearness how much more erroneous such explanations commonly are, when the actions are those of men of another race, to whom the kinship in na ture is comparatively remote. We do, indeed, perceive this, if the interpretations are not our own; and if both the inter preters and the interpreted are mentally alien to us. When, as in early English literature, we find Greek history conceived in terms of feudal institutions, and the heroes of antiquity spoken of as princesses, knights, and squires, it becomes clear that the ideas concerning ancient civilization must have been utterly wrong. When we find Virgil named in religious stories of the middle ages as one among the prophets who vis ited the cradle of Christ — when an illustrated psalter gives scenes from the life of Christ in which there repeatedly figures a castle with a portcullis — when even the crucifixion is de scribed by Langland in the language of chivalry, so that the man who pierced Christ's side with a spear is considered as a knight who disgraced his knighthood * — when we read of the Crusaders calling themselves " vassals of Christ; " we need no further proof that by carrying their own sentiments and ideas to the interpretation of social arrangements and transac tions among the Jews, our ancestors were led into absurd mis conceptions. But we do not recognize the fact that in virtue of the same tendency, we are ever framing conceptions which, if not so grotesquely untrue, are yet very wide of the truth. How difficult it is to imagine mental states remote from our own so correctly that we can understand how they issue in SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL. 105 individual actions, and consequently in social actions, an instance will make manifest.
The feeling of vague wonder with which he received his first lessons in the Greek mythology, will most likely be dimly remembered by every reader. If not in words, still inarticulately, there passed through him the thought that faith in such stories was unaccountable. When, afterwards, he read in books of travels details of the amazing superstitions of savages, there was joined with a sense of the absurdity of these superstitions, much astonishment at their acceptance by any human beings, however ignorant or stupid. Such beliefs as that the people of a neighbouring tribe had descended from ducks, that rain fell when certain deities began to spit on the Earth, that the island lived upon had been pulled up from the bottom of the ocean by one of their gods, whose hook got fast when he was fishing — these, and countless beliefs equally laughable, seemed to imply an irrationality near to insanity. He interpreted them automorphically — carrying with him not simply his own faculties developed to a stage of complexity considerably beyond that reached by the faculties of the sav age, but also the modes of thinking in which he was brought up, and the stock of information he had acquired. Probably it has never since occurred to him to do otherwise. Even if he now attempts to see things from the savage's point of view, he most likely fails entirely; and if he succeeds at all, it is but partially. Yet only by seeing things as the savage sees them can his ideas be understood, his behaviour accounted for, and the resulting social phenomena explained. These apparently-strange superstitions are quite natural — quite ra tional, in a certain sense, in their respective times and places. The laws of intellectual action are the same for civilized and uncivilized. The difference between civilized and uncivilized is in complexity of faculty and in amount of knowledge ac cumulated and generalized. Given, reflective powers devel oped only to that lower degree in which they are possessed by the aboriginal man — given, his small stock of ideas, collected in a narrow area of space, and not added to by records extend ing through time — given, his impulsive nature incapable of patient inquiry; and these seemingly-monstrous stories of his become in reality the most feasible explanations he can find of 106 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.
surrounding things. Yet even after concluding that this must be so, it is not easy to think from the savage's stand point, clearly enough to follow the effects of his ideas on his acts, through all the relations of life, social and other.
A parallel difficulty stands in the way of rightly conceiv ing character remote from our own, so as to see how it issues in conduct. We may best recognize our inability in this re spect, by observing the converse inability of other races to understand our characters, and the acts they prompt.
"Wonderful are the works of Allah! Behold! That Frank is trudging about when he can, if he pleases, sit still I " J In like manner Captain Speke tells us, — " If I walked up and down the same place to stretch my legs, they [Somali] formed councils of war on my motives, considering I must have some secret designs upon their country, or 1 would not do it, as no man in his senses could be guilty of working his legs unneces sarily." 3 But while, by instances like these, we are shown that our characters are in a large measure incomprehensible by races remote in nature from us, the correlative fact that we cannot rightly conceive their sentiments and motives is one perpetu ally overlooked in our sociological interpretations. Feeling, for instance, how natural it is to take an easier course in place of a more laborious course, and to adopt new methods that are proved to be better methods, we are puzzled on finding the Chinese stick to their dim paper-lamps, though they admire our bright argand-lamps, which they do not use if given to them; or on finding that the Hindus prefer their rough primi tive tools, after seeing how our improved tools do more work with less effort. And on descending to races yet more remote in civilization, we still oftener discover ourselves wrong when we suppose that under given conditions they will act as we should act.
Here, then, is a subjective difficulty of a serious kind. To understand any fact in social evolution, we have to see it as resulting from the joint actions of individuals having certain natures. We cannot so understand it without understanding their natures; and this, even by care and effort, we are able to do but very imperfectly. Our interpretations must SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL. 107 be automorphic; and yet automorphism perpetually mis leads us.
One would hardly suppose, a priori, that untruthfulness would habitually co-exist with credulity. Rather our infer ence might be that, because of the tendency above enlarged upon, people most given to making false statements must be people most inclined to suspect statements made by others. Yet, somewhat anomalously, as it seems, habitual veracity generally goes with inclination to doubt evidence; and ex treme untrustworthiness of assertion often has for its con comitant, readiness to accept the greatest improbabilities on the slenderest testimony. If you compare savage with civilized, or compare the successive stages of civilization with one an other, you find untruthfulness and credulity decreasing to gether; until you reach the modern man of science, who is at once exact in his statements and critical respecting evidence. The converse relation to that seen in the man of science, is even now startlingly presented in the East, where greediness in swallowing fictions goes along with superfluous telling of falsehoods. An Egyptian prides himself in a clever lie, uttered perhaps without motive; and a dyer will even ascribe the failure in fixing one of his colours to the not having been successful in a deception. Yet so great is the readiness to be lieve improbabilities, that Mr. St. John, in his Two Years' Residence in a Levantine Family, narrates how, when the " Arabian Nights' Entertainments " was being read aloud, and when he hinted that the stories must not be accepted as true, there arose a strong protest against such scepticism: the ques tion being asked, — " Why should a man sit down and write so many lies? " * I point out this union of seemingly-inconsistent traits, not because of the direct bearing it has on the argument, but be cause of its indirect bearing. For I have here to dwell on the misleading effects of certain mental states which similarly appears unlikely to co-exist, and which yet do habitually co exist. I refer to the belief which, even while I write, I find repeated in the leading journal, that " the deeper a student of history goes, the more does he find man the same in all time; " and to the opposite belief embodied in current politics, that 108 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.
human nature may be readily altered. These two beliefs, •which ought to cancel one another but do not, originate two classes of errors in sociological speculation; and nothing like correct conclusions in Sociology can be drawn until they have been rejected and replaced by a belief which reconciles them — the belief that human nature is indefinitely modifiable, but that 110 modification of it can be brought about rapidly. We will glance at the errors to which each of these beliefs leads.
While it was held that the stars are fixed and that the hills are everlasting, there was a certain coiigruity in the notion that man continues unchanged from age to age; but now when we know that all stars arc in motion, and that there are no such things as everlasting hills — now when we find all things throughout the Universe to be in a ceaseless flux, it is time for this crude conception of human nature to disappear out of our social conceptions; or rather — it is time for its dis appearance to be followed by that of the many narrow notions respecting the past and the future of society, which have grown out of it, and which linger notwithstanding the loss of their root. For, avowedly by some and tacitly by others, it continues to be thought that the human heart is as " desper ately wicked " as it ever was, and that the state of society hereafter will be very much like the state of society now. If, when the evidence has been piled mass upon mass, there comes a reluctant admission that aboriginal man, of troglodyte or kindred habits, differed somewhat from man as he was dur ing feudal times, and that the customs and sentiments and beliefs he had in feudal times, imply a character appreciably unlike that which he has now — if, joined with this, there is a recognition of the truth that along with these changes in man there have gone still more conspicuous changes in society; there is, nevertheless, an ignoring of the implication that hereafter man and society will continue to change, until they have diverged as widely from their existing types as their'ex- istiiig tvpes have diverged from those of the earliest recorded ages. It is true that among the more cultured the probability, or even the certainty, that such transformations will go on, may be granted; but the granting is but nominal — the adtais- sion does not become a factor in the conclusions drawn. The first discussion on a political or social topic, reveals the tacit SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL. 109 assumption that, in times to come, society will have a struc ture substantially like its existing structure. If, for instance, the question of domestic service is raised, it mostly happens that its bearings are considered wholly in reference to those social arrangements which exist around us: only a few pro ceed on the supposition that these arrangements are probably but transitory. It is so throughout. Be the subject industrial organization, or class-relations, or rule by fashion, the thought which practically moulds the conclusions, if not the thought theoretically professed, is, that whatever changes they may undergo, our institutions will not cease to be recognizably the same. Even those who have, as they think, deliberately freed themselves from this perverting tendency — even M. Comte and his disciples, believing in an entire transformation of society, nevertheless betray an incomplete emancipation; for the ideal society expected by them, is one under regulation by a hier archy essentially akin to hierarchies such as mankind have known. So that everywhere sociological thinking is more or less impeded by the difficulty of bearing in mind that the social states towards which our race is being carried, are prob ably as little conceivable by us as our present social state was conceivable by a Norse pirate and his followers.
Note, now, the opposite difficulty, which appears to be sur mountable by scarcely any of our parties, political or philan thropic, — the difficulty of understanding that human nature, though indefinitely modifiable, can be modified but very slowly; and that all laws and institutions and appliances which count on getting from it, within a short time, much better results than present ones, will inevitably fail. If we glance over the programmes of societies, and sects, and schools of all kinds, from Rousseau's disciples in the French Con vention up to the members of the United Kingdom Alliance, from the adherents of the Ultramontane propaganda up to the enthusiastic advocates of an education exclusively secular, we find in them one common trait. They are all pervaded by the conviction, now definitely expressed and now taken as a self-evident truth, that there needs but this kind of in struction or that kind of discipline, this mode of repression or that system of culture, to bring society into a very much better state. Here we read that " it is necessary completely HO THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.
to re-fashion the people whom one wishes to make free ": the implication being1 that a re-fashioning is practicable. There it is taken as undeniable that when you have taught children what they ought to do to be good citizens, they will become good citizens. Elsewhere it is held to be a truth beyond question, that if by law temptations to drink are removed from men, they will not only cease to drink, but thereafter cease to commit crimes. And yet the delusiveness of all such hopes is obvious enough to any one not blinded by a hypoth esis, or carried away by an enthusiasm. The fact, often pointed out to temperance-fanatics, that some of the soberest nations in Europe yield a proportion of crime higher than our own, might suffice to show them that England would not be suddenly moralized if they carried their proposed re strictions into effect. The superstition that good behaviour is to be forthwith produced by lessons learnt out of school- books, which was long ago statistically disproved,8 would, but for preconceptions, be utterly dissipated by observing to what a slight extent knowledge affects conduct — by observing that the dishonesty implied in the adulterations of tradesmen and manufacturers, in fraudulent bankruptcies, in bubblecompanies, in " cooking " of railway accounts and financial prospectuses, differs only in form, and not in amount, from the dishonesty of the uneducated — by observing how amaz ingly little the teachings given to medical students affect their lives, and how even the most experienced medical men have their prudence scarcely at all increased by their infor mation. Similarly, the Utopian ideas which come out afresh along with every new political scheme, from the " paper-con stitutions " of the Abbe Sieves down to the lately-published programme of M. Louis Blanc, and from agitations for vote- by-ballot up to those which have a Eepublic for their aim, might, but for this tacit belief we are contemplating, be extinguished by the facts perpetually and startlingly thrust on our attention. Again and again for three generations has France been showing to the world how impossible it is essen tially to change the type of a social structure by any re arrangement wrought out through a revolution. However great the transformation may for a time seem, the original thing re-appears in disguise. Out of the nominally-free SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL, m government set up a new despotism arises, differing from the old by having a new shibboleth and new men to utter it; but identical with the old in the determination to put down opposition and in the means used to this end. Liberty, wThen obtained, is forthwith surrendered to an avowed autocrat; or, as we have seen within this year, is allowed to lapse into the hands of one who claims the reality of autocracy without its title. Nay, the change is, in fact, even less; for the regulative organization which ramifies throughout French society, con tinues unaltered by these changes at the governmental centre. The bureaucratic system persists equally under Imperialist, Constitutional, and Republican arrangements. As the Due d'Audiffret-Pasquier pointed out, "Empires fall, Ministries pass away, but Bureaux remain." The aggregate of forces and tendencies embodied, not only in the structural arrange ments holding the nation together, but in the ideas and sentiments of its units, is so powerful, that the excision of a part, even though it be the government, is quickly fol lowed by the substitution of a like part. It needs but to recall the truth exemplified some chapters back, that the properties of the aggregate are determined by the properties of its units, to see at once that so long as the characters of citizens remain substantially unchanged, there can be no sub stantial change in the political organization which has slowly been evolved by them.
This double difficulty of thought, with the double set of delusions fallen into by those who do not surmount it, is, indeed, naturally associated with the once-universal, and still- general, belief that societies arise by manufacture, instead of arising, as they do, by evolution. Recognize the truth that incorporated masses of men grow, and acquire their structural characters through modification upon modification, and there are excluded these antithetical errors that humanity remains the same and that humanity is readily alterable; and along with exclusion of these errors comes admission of the infer ence, that the changes which have brought social arrange ments to a form so different from past forms, will in future carry them on to forms as different from those now existing. Once become habituated to the thought of a continuous unfolding of the whole and of each part, and these misleading 112 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.
ideas disappear. Take a word and observe how, while chang ing1, it gives origin in course of time to a family of words, each changing member of which similarly has progeny; take a custom, as that of giving eggs at Easter, which has now developed in Paris into the fashion of making expensive presents of every imaginable kind inclosed in imitation-eggs, becoming at length large enough to contain a brougham, and which entails so great a tax that people go abroad to evade it; take a law, once quite simple and made to meet a special case, and see how it eventually, by successive additions and changes, grows up into a complex group of laws, as, out of two laws of William the Conqueror came our whole legal system regulating land-tenure; * take a social appliance, as the Press, and see how from the news-letter, originally private and written, and then assuming the shape of a printed fly-leaf to a written private letter, there has slowly evolved this vast assemblage of journals and periodicals, daily, weekly, general, and local, that have, individually and as an aggregate, grown in size while growing in heterogeneity; do this, and do the like with all other established institutions, agencies, products, and there will come naturally the conviction that now, too, there are various germs of things which will in the future develop in ways no one imagines, and take shares in pro found transformations of society and of its members: trans formations that are hopeless as immediate results, but certain as ultimate results.
Try to fit a hand with five fingers into a glove with four. Your difficulty aptly parallels the difficulty of putting a com plex conception into a mind not having a proportionately-com plex faculty. As fast as the several terms and relations which make up a thought become many and varied, there must be brought into play many and varied parts of the intellectual structure, before the thought can be comprehended: and if some of these parts are wanting, only fragments of the thought can be taken in. Consider an instance.
What is meant by the ratio of A to B, may be explained to a boy by drawing a short line A and a long line B, telling him that A is said to bear a small ratio to B; and then, after lengthening the line A, telling him that A is now said to bear SUBJECTIVE DIFFICULTIES— INTELLECTUAL. H3 a larger ratio to B. But suppose I have to explain what is meant by saying that the ratio of A to B, equals the ratio of C to D. Instead of two different quantities and one relation, there are now four different quantities and three relations. To understand the proposition, the boy has to think of A and B and their difference, and, without losing his intellectual grasp of these, he has to think of C and D and their difference, and, without losing his intellectual grasp of these, he has to think of the two differences as each having a like relation to its pair of quantities. Thus the number of terms and relations to be kept before the mind, is such as to imply the co-operation of many more agents of thought; any of which being absent, the proposition cannot be understood: the boy must be older before he will understand it, and, if uncultured, will probably never understand it at all. Let us pass on to a conception of still greater complexity — say that the ratio of A to B varies as the ratio of C to D. Far more numerous things have now to be represented in consciousness with approximate simulta neity. A and B have to be thought of as not constant in their lengths, but as one or both of them changing in their lengths; so that their difference is indefinitely variable. Similarly with C and D. And then the variability of the ratio in each case being duly conceived in terms of lines that lengthen and shorten, the thing to be understood is, that whatever differ ence any change brings about between A and B, the relation it bears to one or other of them, is always like that which the difference simultaneously arising between C and D bears to one or other of them. The greater multiplicity of ideas re quired for mentally framing this proposition, evidently puts it further beyond the reach of faculties not developed by ap propriate culture, or not capable of being so developed. And as the type of proposition becomes still more involved, as it does when two such groups of dependent variables are com pared and conclusions drawn, it begins to require a grasp that is easy only to the disciplined mathematician.
One who does not possess that complexity of faculty which, as we here see, is requisite for grasping a complex conception, may, in cases like these, become conscious of his incapacity; not from perceiving what he lacks, but from perceiving that another person achieves results which he cannot achieve. 9 114: THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.
But where no such thing as the verifying of exact predictions comes in to prove to one of inferior faculty that his faculty is inferior, he is usually unaware of the inferiority. To im agine a higher mode of consciousness, is in some degree to have it; so that until he has it in some degree, he cannot really conceive of its existence. An illustration or two will make this clear.