This is the fundamental law of history and Sociology, recognized the world over, as much as the law of gravitation. To blink it, is to go wild or blind. This is the law of progress upon which all human affairs expand, and there is scarcely a difference in wording it. For instance, in the last book out on "Economics,"--that of Prof. George Gunton, he says (p. 22): "Progress is an _integrating_ differentiation. Only that differentiation is progressive which results in _new_ integrations and greater complexity of social relations." Comte's, and Fiske's, and Herbert Spencer's statements of the same law are the same in substance, but too well known to quote here. So Professor Huxley in his "Administrative Nihilism," Henry George in "Social Problems," and indeed pretty much everybody who touches the subject, except Mr. Savage. He, however, has the grace to admit that "The world began in Socialism,"--and, by the law referred to, it will continue in an ever-enlarging, integrating Socialism, till the rise of "the complete individual" will result. Yes, man's origin was social; from the "Social Anthropoids,"--says Professor Huxley; and to omit the continuance of this social fact and law in sociology is worse than talking pre-Copernican astronomy. That should be left to our metaphysical anarchists, who chatter as if man was a solitarily created "Adam," defying the social "compact" of Rousseau, or dickering as to the terms upon which he will "come in." From Henry C. Carey's noble work, "Social Science," Americans should have heard, if not read, enough of this law of enlarging integration never to forget it, or to let those address them who have. He illustrates it not only by human history, but by the fundamental law of biology from Oken, Goethe, and the evolutionists generally. This application has been continued by them to the present day; the last instance I noticed is that of Prof. Ernst Haeckel, translated in Dr. Paul Carus' late work, "The Soul of Man." This law measures the progress of organisms from the homogeneous jelly-fish to the complex elephant or man; from the savage tribe to the Roman Empire, or the future "Federation of Mankind and Parliament of the World." Integration is the mother, nurse, and protector of the individual. In history and politics this law stands, however expressed or applied, as the door which opens to the mental vision, the river of human evolution and progress,--a sight grander far than Niagara. Those who see not this fact, law, vision!--are socially blind. In industrial and economic evolution the same law of progress holds. The tribal homogeneous industry, when one man did work at everything, became heterogeneous, special, and complex, as society enlarged and advanced into higher integrations, and as the life of the individual became more and more advanced through Fetichism, Polytheism, Monotheism, to our modern inception of Humanism. Do you stop this lecture to say that all this is a truism--a "chestnut"?