Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/527

Rh exchange develops and the distances between exchangers increases, some men can profitably charge themselves with the carrying of messages or the conveyance of goods, and thus set up a communicating and transporting system. These trite phenomena rebaptised as "circulatory system," "internuncial apparatus," "social nervous system," are supposed to open a broad vista into the very depths of social philosophy.

Yet all that is absolutely bound up with this development is a complete change in the outward industrial activity of the individual, coupled with a growing power to satisfy his wants by means of this activity. The interrelations of men on which so much stress is laid need be in no sense relations of fellowship or sociability. One may adapt his craft to the likings of buyers as the hunter suits his arts to the game, or the boatman times his strokes to the waves of the lake. Nor does the fact that the adaptation is reciprocal relieve the deadness of it. If in the differentiating economic group there is anything to hinder each from using his fellows in furtherance of his private schemes in just the same spirit in which he would use farm animals or tools, it is not brought out in Mr. Spencer's sociology. The word "organism" with its suggestion of complete unity does not fit such a group. When without change in motives, aims or ends individuals enter into and live in the associated states, merely that they may thereby gain their private ends by a new and easier route, the aggregate thus formed is a mechanical affair, no more organic than a board of trade, a factory group or a whaling crew. It is dead mechanism—a handy combination-form of great industrial efficiency, but no more. If this be the essence of social development, we may dispense with sociology, for the economist long ago described the social system of wealth far better than the sociologist has ever done, and that without aid from biology. It must be admitted, therefore, either that the phenomena of specialization, communication and exchange are not the sole primary characters, or else that society is nothing more than the long familiar economic aggregate.

When settled social life permits the greater knowledge that