Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/444

432 an animal that was not even gregarious by instinct, and that human society, like so many other facts that I have been enumerating, is purely a product of his reason and arose by insensible degrees, pari passu with the development of his brain. In other words, I regard human association as the result of the perceived advantage which it yields, and as coming into existence only in proportion as that advantage was perceived by the only faculty capable of perceiving it, the intellect. In Dynamic Sociology I took strong ground against the Aristotelian idea that man is a gregarious animal and the Comtean doctrine that he is by nature a social being, and pointed out a large number of what I called "anti-social" qualities in his nature, and I also worked out what I conceived must have been the several steps which the race has taken in its passage from the purely animal state to the developed social state. I do not adhere to that position now merely because I assumed it then, but rather because, notwithstanding the little real evidence, subsequent indications have tended to confirm it. I will here emphasize only one point. Human government is an art only possible in a rational being. No animal possesses a government in any such sense. The primary object of government is to protect society from just these anti-social influences, and it is generally admitted that without it society could not exist. This means that even in the most enlightened peoples the anti-social tendencies are still so strong that they would disrupt society but for an artificial system of protection. To call man of whom this can be said a social being by nature is obviously absurd. No doubt strong social impulses exist among men, but they are the product of ages of constraint. Man may be in process of becoming a social being, but he will not have really become such until it shall be possible to dispense entirely with the protective function of government. Universal education and further centuries of custom may ultimately transform human character to this extent, until habit shall become at least a second