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Naturally pain is the most impressive fact, for pleasure is a normal condition and only felt in contrast to pain. Pain is some interference with natural law, and as such makes itself sharply felt. Man was led to the study of physiology through pathology; the ache introduced us to the stomach. So society feels first and most what hurts it, and our study of sociology is prefaced by social pathology. And as men, in their first gropings after relief from pain, practised all manner of tricks with fetich-worship, with wild, noisy dances, with filthy medicines, with murderous leeches and lances and poisonous pills; and as still, among the ignorant, any wide-blazoned patent medicine is sure of acceptance if it promises to cure the pain, felt but not understood; so society’s first efforts at relief are superstitious, empirical, and often deadly bad for its system.

We need the patient, scientific study of the social body, its structure and functions, anatomy, physiology, and pathology, as we have had it for the physical body; we need careful, recorded observation of the results of previous remedies, and of new ones as well, and all this is a new field of science. We have plenty of facts at hand; all history lies behind us with its glaring records; all life is before us to-day in every stage of development; but we have only begun to arrange and study those facts from the point of view of the sociologist. If a watch goes wrong, we examine its “works” for fracture, loss, misplacement, or some “foreign body”; but to do this successfully involves knowledge of what a watch is, what it is for, how it is made, and how it works. We must know the mechanics of the thing if we are to mend it. So if Society goes wrong we must examine its works, and we cannot tell if they are wrong, nor set them right, unless we have some knowledge of what Society is, what it is for, how it was made, and, above all, how it works.