ithin the century
that Comte, Buckle, Marx, Spencer and other historians and sociologists
have made an attempt to place the accumulations of social knowledge on a
par with the accumulations of mathematical or chemical knowledge.

Until some effort was made to study society in a scientific spirit,
there was no reason for supposing that men might be able to cope with
social ills or to prevent social disaster. Even to-day, while there is
no longer any question as to the possibility of classifying social
facts, and while sociology is regarded as a science of great promise,
the feeling lingers that social events are fore-ordained. Many people
feel to-day about social disaster as the men of the middle ages felt
about the plague--that it is outside the field of man's preventive
power. Another fatalistic school of thought holds that men learn their
social lessons only through failure and disaster. According to the first
line of thought it is useless to interfere with social processes because
they are in the hands of the gods; according to the second, men will not
interfere until they have been whipped into rebellion by the adverse
conditions surrounding them.

Men in the past have modified the course of human events in the most
profound way. The first smelter of iron and the first constructor of a
wheel began a series of events that is still molding social life. It is
quite possible to say that these events were fore-ordained, but it is at
least equally possible to reply that the same process of
fore-ordination is still busy, and that the changes that it will make
through the present generation will be at least as important as those
which it has made in the preceding ages.

Those who believe that the race learns only through hardships and
suffering should bear in mind: first, that most of the knowledge
communicated to the individuals of each generation is communicated
indirectly through some process of education; second, that society is
composed of those individuals; third, that modern communities have built
a vast machine whose sole purpose it is to influence opinion by teaching
(indirectly) in the school, in the church, through the printed page and
the film. In Japan this machine is employed to teach the people the
sanctity of the emperor; in Britain it is used to convince the masses of
the sanctity of business-as-usual; in France it is used to proclaim the
sanctity of property; in Russia it is used to inculcate the sanctit