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This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1891. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... The Specific Use Of The Kindergarten. OCIETY is an organism, and, as such, subject to organic laws. Viewed at any single moment or limited portion ot time, it appears to us composed of individuals that are grouped in more or less complex forms, in families, associations for a variety of purposes, communities of greater or smaller extent; viewed in its growth, its life, its history, it appears to us as a succession of generations presenting phenomena, similar in their superficial phases to" those of childhood, boyhood, manhood, old age, and in their deeper aspects to the phenomena observed in the evolution of various organisms high and low. Viewing them in their aggregate, their universal history, we can not fail to find in these societies analogies with the evolution of species; we can not fail to discover relations among different societies, similar to those existing among different individuals and among different species ot organic life; we cannot fail to see that in the highest manifestations of civilized society there is--as in the individual-- a conscious tendency to unification, which finds its highest proximate aim in a conscious, all-embracing humanity. These analogies have been established so clearly in the light which modern methods of study throw upon Science and History, (45) and so lucidly set forth by Herbert Spencer and bis followers, that I need only point out a few leading principles which have a bearing on my subject. As in the individual organism, so in the social organism, growth is a gradual, natural increase, resulting from the union of- similar elements. These similar elements unite into more or less mobile compounds which are distributed to the different parts of the social organism by a kind of circulation, to be assimilated or ...
