In the phaenomena of the social
state, the collective phaenomenon is more accessible to us than the
parts of which it is composed. This is already, in a great degree, true
of the mere animal body. It is essential to the idea of an organism, and
it is even more true of the social organism than of the individual. The
state of every part of the social whole at any time, is intimately
connected with the contemporaneous state of all the others. Religious
belief, philosophy, science, the fine arts, the industrial arts,
commerce, navigation, government, all are in close mutual dependence on
one another, insomuch that when any considerable change takes place in
one, we may know that a parallel change in all the others has preceded
or will follow it. The progress of society from one general state to
another is not an aggregate of partial changes, but the product of a
single impulse, acting through all the partial agencies, and can
therefore be most easily traced by studying them together. Could it even
be detected in them separately, its true nature could not be understood
except by examining them in the _ensemble_. In constructing, therefore,
a theory of society, all the different aspects of the social
organization must be taken into consideration at once.
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