er been noticed, obtains
between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of
zoological evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.

It will be best to prepare the ground for my thesis by a few very
general remarks on the method of getting at scientific truth. It is a
common platitude that a complete acquaintance with any one thing,
however small, would require a knowledge of the entire universe. Not a
sparrow falls to the ground but some of the remote conditions of his
fall are to be found in the milky way, in our federal constitution, or
in the early history of Europe. That is to say, alter the milky way,
alter the federal constitution, alter the facts of our barbarian
ancestry, and the universe would so far be a different universe from
what it now is. One fact involved in the difference might be that the
particular little street-boy who threw the stone which brought down the
sparrow might not find himself opposite the sparrow at that particular
moment; or, finding himself there, he might not be in that particular
serene and disengaged mood of mind which expressed itself in throwing
the stone. But, true as all this is, it would be very foolish for any
one who {217} was inquiring the cause of the sparrow's fall to overlook
the boy as too personal, proximate, and so to speak anthropomorphic an
agent, and to say that the true cause is the federal constitution, the
westward migration of the Celtic race, or the structure of the milky
way. If we proceeded on that method, we might say with perfect
legitimacy that a friend of ours, who had slipped on the ice upon his
door-step and cracked his skull, some months after dining with thirteen
at the table, died because of that ominous feast. I know, in fact, one
such instance; and I might, if I chose, contend with perfect logical
propriety that the slip on the ice was no real accident. "There are no
accidents," I might say, "for science. The whole history of the world
converged to produce that slip. If anything had been left out, the
slip would not have occurred just there and then. To say it would is
to deny the relations of cause and effect throughout the universe. The
real cause of the death was not the slip, _but the conditions which
engendered the slip_,--and among them his having sat at a table, six
months previous, one among thirteen. _That_ is truly the reason why he
died within the year."

It will soon be seen whose arguments I am, in form,