COLLECTIVE TELES1S 815
to the soil and move about in space on four legs, feeding on other plants instead of air, would be called a vain boaster by the surrounding vegetation ; a barnacle that should insist that it would one day have a backbone would be utterly discredited by other barnacles ; a bat that should fly into a dark corner of a room and escape through an opening known to be there would be called a fool by the bee that was vainly buzzing against a pane of glass in the hope of accomplishing the same object. 1 It is the "impossible" that happens. We can look backward more easily than we can look forward. Science teaches us that some- thing has happened. Evolution proves that immense changes have taken place, and now that we can see what they were and accord- ing to what principles they were brought about there is nothing so startling in the facts. It is only when we try to imagine our- selves as present before an event and striving to forecast it that we realize the folly of raising such objections as we are consid- ering. Yet this is our real attitude with respect to future events. It may be logical, admitting that progress is to go on and that great changes are to take place, to question whether any partic- ular change that anyone may describe is to be the one that will actually occur. There is no probability that anyone can fore- tell what the real condition of society is to be in the future. But it is illogical, in the light of the past, of history, and especially of natural history, and of what we actually know of evolution, cos- mic, organic, and social, to say that any condition to which this knowledge points as a normal result of the continued action of the laws of evolution is impossible.
In treating the relations of sociology to the various other sciences cosmology, biology, anthropology, psychology in the second, third, fourth, and fifth papers of this scries, and in the more general discussion of the position and affinities of soci-
1 This point of view was never so admirably stated as in the remarkable poem by Charlotte Perkins Stetson entitled "Similar Cases/' now familiar to nearly everybody, having gone the complete rounds of the press. Also to be found in her collection of poems entitled / Tltis Our World anJ Other Potms, San Francisco (Barry & Marble, publisher*), 1895, P- 72-
