Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/123

 Rh afterwards the unparalleled remainder by which the societary facts exceed in complexity the biological facts.

The method of societary analysis which Schaeffle elaborated in such detail that few people have had the patience to understand him, is at bottom simply persistent pursuit of the discovery that human associations have all the degrees of complexity manifested by vital organisms—plus. The method which Schaeffle developed so minutely is not properly changeable with any of the alleged literalism which has been asserted of it, and of which earlier forms of the method are surely guilty. It starts with the postulate that "society" is a reality which is at least as complicated as "life" in the biological sense. The inference follows that interpretation of this complexity will discover many relations between societary facts which will be elucidated by comparison with relations between vital facts. To begin with, we find at once that, like plants and animals, any portion of societary order is an outgrowth of earlier order, and is affecting the character of associations that are developing. In the case of societies too, as with animals, we find that the form of development has apparently been determined in part by physical environment. The study of societies involves therefore the tracing of an evolutionary process within forms of human association. Instead of being an innovation due to sociology, this perception has been more or less familiar to historians and philosophers as far back as Aristotle, and probably much earlier. Sociologists are simply sharpening one of the tools which their predecessors already used. The stage of evolution which is exhibited in existing animals or in societies, has to be found out by minute observation and interpretation of the forms of coexistence and of coöperation between the elements that make up the respective units. The idea of structure and function is made in this investigation to serve the same purpose which the idea of causal relationship in one or another form has served in history.

The whole story about the biological analogy, as thus suggested, is that it is, up to date, the nearest approach we have to an interpretation of the most complicated correlations that occur in human experience. In order to get our minds clear as to the greater complexity of societary phenomena, we have no recourse so useful as employment of the concepts which familiarity with the next antecedent order of complexity furnishes. These will serve us in preliminary surveys, at any rate, but their best service in a given case may be their