rstanding of either aspect of
modern industry. We shall therefore in this study confine our
attention to the concrete aspect of capitalism, merely indicating by
passing references some of the direct effects upon industrial methods,
especially in the expansion and complexity of markets, of the
elaborate monetary system of modern exchange.

Sec. 5. The inherent difficulty which besets every literary presentation
of the study of a living and changing organism is here present in no
ordinary degree. A book of physiology is necessarily defective in that
it can neither present the just simultaneity of phenomena which occur
together, nor the just sequence of phenomena which are successive.
Diagrams may serve effectively to set forth tolerably simple
simultaneity, but a complex diagram inevitably fails of its object;
for it confuses the sight of one who seeks to simultaneously grasp the
whole, and thus compels a successive examination of different parts
which is generally inferior to skilled narration, in that it affords
no security of the fittest order of examination of the parts. For
certain simple relations between the movements of a few definite
objects a working model may be serviceable; but when complex changes
of shape, pace, and local relations exist, when intricate interaction
takes place, and when new phenomena arise affecting by their presence
all former ones, little can be effected by such visual presentment.
Still less can a succession of diagrams assist us to realise the
continuity of the working of such shifting forces as are presented in
industrial movements.

Thus while the impossibility of adequate experimentation, the
difficulties of scientific observations of phenomena so vast in scope
and so intricate in their relations, make the student of sociological
subjects more dependent upon printed records for his material than is
the case in most other sciences, these printed records induce a
sequence of thought antagonistic to the grasp of a living and moving
unity. This cause is primarily responsible for the failure of many of
the ablest and subtlest economic treatises to impress upon the reader
a clear conception of the industrial world as a single "going
concern." Each piece of the mechanism is clearly described, and the
reader is informed how it fits into the parts which are most closely
related to it, but no simultaneous grasp of the mechanism as a working
whole is attained. When we graft upon the idea of a