THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 231
them by their general traits and to know them in particular. In every age each of them has done much that does not appear on the surface. The family, for instance, is not a "domestic" institution alone. It has always been, more or less, each of the other kinds of institution ceremonial, political, ecclesiastical, professional, industrial. The same thing is true of each of the other groups of institutions. The paterfamilias, the priest, the king, the artist, the farmer, the blacksmith, do not have one and the same meaning in all times and places. In one society the farmer may be little more than a part of the clod he tills, while in another he may be maker of political constitutions and a prophet of new civilizations. The priest may be either a min- ister of religion or a pander to political and personal corruption. The king may be either a creator and developer of the state, or a parasite sapping the material and moral power of his people. Institutions are but the shell of social activities. Analyses of them simply as institutions are necessary ; but that sort of analy- sis is merely a step toward more real analysis of the place which they actually occupy in working social arrangements, and of the social content which their operation actually secures.
While Spencer's account of social structure and functions is not to be recommended as the final form which those concepts should take in our minds, it is historically and pedagogically expedient to approach more literal renderings of actual social structure and function through Spencer's version. All the sociologists have obtained their present insight by means of preliminary analyses more or less like Spencer's. It is doubtful if anyone will reach the limits of our present perceptions of social relations without making some use of the Spencerian mode of approach. This does not mean that there is any logi- cal relation of antecedent and consequent, of premise and con- clusion, between the method of biological analogy and literal interpretation of social structures and functions. It simply means that, as a practical matter, there is no way of making the intimacy and complexity and interdependence of social struc- tural and functional relations so vivid as by making biological structures and functions illustrate them. This latter device,
