insensible grades the individuals of his various classes, plants or animals, fade into each other, yet his distinctions, however faint at the outline, are clear enough in the colour. So, too, the observer of inorganic nature must assume the lines which nature does not draw. Least of all should the observer of social life expect minute exactness in those abstract classifications by which he attempts to overcome difficulties peculiarly great in his subject—to stop ideally the constant motion of social life in a kind of instantaneous photograph of its facts, and then to offer an explanation of these facts and a series of pictures detailing social life in progress and explaining its complicated motion. In nature, as A. W. Schlegel has pointedly remarked, the boundaries of objects run into one another; surely it will not be supposed that any magic of science can banish this natural indistinctness of outline?
§ 26. When, therefore, we say that the "clan" is a social classification, we need not be ashamed to admit the ideal character of our abstract term, or our inability to state precisely the points at which its communal career begins and ends. But we must know the leading facts which this abstract term idealises, the wide domain of human history which clan life has dominated, the significant truth that this form of social organisation, under a great variety of names and a considerable variety of features, is the most archaic to which historical science enables us to ascend with confidence. We shall, therefore, explain our ideal of clan life and the nature of the archaic universality it claims so far as anything human can claim that proud title. But first we have something to say about the practical and theoretic conditions which have turned men's attention to the clan organisation.
The importance which the clan has assumed in recent
