CONCLUSION

269

ences seemed to monopolize all the energy. What should
have been a means had become an end in itself, and the
sociologists were hardly less satisfied with their institutional
 genealogies than the Greeks were with their personal
genealogies.
It might therefore easily be maintained that from the
point of view of science, the concept of social evolution has
done more harm than good. The great advance of the natural
 sciences is perhaps to a large extent due to the fact
that they were well under way before the evolutionary
viewpoint invaded scientific thinking in those fields. Another
 element which has no doubt contributed is the fact
that they have always been imbued with a spirit which was
directed toward ultimate practical results and not toward
the discovery of material for philosophic or historical speculation.

Modern chemistry would not be where it is today if
most of its energy had been spent in trying to find out how
the lead atom has developed out of the helium atom in the
course of time. That problem indicates the existence of another
 legitimate field of inquiry, but it does not mean that
the inquiry regarding the properties of elements is of no
importance. It is because chemistry has been directed primarily
 toward the processes of function and not toward
the process of growth that it has reached a stage where it
is of practical value and can supply the answers to questions
 regarding the means to definite ends. In the medical
sciences, the great advance is due in similar fashion to the
study of functional processes as independent of species, and
not primarily to evolutionary biology.
The evolutionary viewpoint, which in practice turned
out to be merely a reversed teleological viewpoint, has led
in the social sciences to an emphasis on the time series and
a neglect of the timeless aspect. And even the study of the