Inventors frequently hit upon new ideas or upon novel devices by chance, but for every such chance discovery, there are scores and probably hundreds of ideas and devices that have been carefully thought out, worked over, rejected, revised, modified, until they produced the desired results. There is a margin of chance in all experiment, but surrounding it there is a vast field of careful thinking and planning and of endless purposeful endeavor.
These observations are commonplaces in the laboratory and in the department of research. They have filtered through to thinking people who begin to understand the part that experiment plays in all forms of scientific progress. There is a general agreement that if there is to be an increase in the knowledge that men possess regarding the mechanical forces, the only sure way of gaining this knowledge is to weigh, measure, describe and classify. This applies to solids, liquids, gases, rocks, plants, animals, and even to the structure and function of the human body. But when it comes to social institutions, even the wisest hesitate and question. Is it possible that social knowledge can be gained only in this way?
There is no other way! Like the individuals of which it is composed, society must investigate, experiment, and learn through trial and error. Indeed, that is the tacitly accepted method by which social knowledge is accumulated. History is a record of social experiments—not so consciously directed nor so carefully planned as the experiments that are taking place in the chemical laboratory, but experiments none the less. What other explanation can account for the many forms of family relationship, the many varieties of religious organizations, the numerous types of political institutions, the multitude of educational institutions. "Educational experiments" are the commonplaces of the pedagog. Slavery was one of society's economic experiments, feudalism was another, capitalism is a third. Through successive generations these institutions have been built up, reformed, discarded and replaced. The history of social institutions is a history of social experiment—of community progress through trial and error.
Obstacles are thrown in the way of the social experimenter. Vested interests seek to convince the credulous and the ignorant that whatever is, is right. The jobs of office holders, the possessions of property owners, the security of ruling classes, depend upon their ability to sit on the lid of social experiment. "Do not touch, do not think, do not question!" is the warning of masters to their social vassals. Those who eat of the apple of experiment acquire the knowledge of good and evil, and with this knowledge comes the desire to reject and destroy the evil while they hold fast and augment the good.
Those who have learned, and who have dared to protest, have been ridiculed, persecuted, outlawed. Sometimes their bones have bleached on the gibbet or rotted in dungeons. Still, the jail, the gallows and the lynching-bee have not kept experimenters quiet in the past, and they will probably not do so in the future.
During recent times—particularly in the last fifty years—the changes in economic and social life have been so rapid that the "always was and always will be" protest is having a harder and harder time to make itself heard above the clatter of the social house-wreckers, and the rap and beat of the social construction engineers.
The present economic society is an experiment—less than a century old in most parts of the world. It has evolved rapidly through a series of forms, corresponding with the rapid advances in the methods by which men wrested a living from nature.
The masses of the people in industrial countries have abandoned their farms, their villages and their rural life, have moved into the cities, and have gone to work in the mines, factories, mills, stores and offices, very much as the mechanics and farmers dropped their accustomed tools and rushed to the gold fields of California and Australia. Within two or three generations the whole basis of life has been shifted and a new order has been established. This change has been made for the purpose of securing a better living.
The people in the industrial countries have accepted capitalism as an essentially desirable means of gaining a livelihood. The new order has given them an opportunity for mass living that has been reserved in the past for a small percentage of the people. It has provided an immense number of things, for the most part inconsequential and tawdry, but things nevertheless which would appeal to the possessive instincts of those who had never enjoyed many possessions.