Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/183

 CONCEPTS AND METHODS OF SOCIOLOGY \"Jl

another type, according as it is on the whole coercive, or on the whole liberal, in character.

The fourth class of social facts pertains to the great end, to the attainment of which the social organization is a means. That end is the Social Welfare. The social welfare is seen in its most general form in certain public utilities, including security, justice and liberty, material prosperity, and popular culture. It is seen finally in the type of personality that the social life creates, and which must be studied as vitality, mentality, morality, and sociality.

Not every society individually considered survives long enough to pass through all the possible stages of social evolution, but society in the aggregate, and in historic continuity, displays to us four distinguishable stages of evolutionary advance. There is, first, the stage of Zoogenic Association, in which the mutual aid and protection practiced by animal bands plays an enormously important part in the differentiation of species and in the survival of those best endowed with intelligence and sympathy. There is, next, the stage of Anthropogenic Association, in which, through unnumbered ages, the creature that was destined to become man was acquiring the distinctly human attributes of language and reason. There is, later on, the stage of Ethnogenic Asso- ciation, wherein is evolved that complex tribal organization characteristic of savage and barbarian life. Finally, there is the stage of Civic or Demogenic Association, in which great peoples outgrow tribal organization, and create a political organization based on common interests t irrespective of blood-relationships.

These categories of social fact have established certain natural subdivisions in social science. Corresponding to the historical order we have, first, studies in animal sociology; sec- ond, studies of primitive human culture; third, the great sciences of ethnography and ethnology, investigating tribally organized mankind ; and, fourth, history, the narrative and descriptive account of the evolution of civil society. Corresponding to the four great divisions of phenomena in contemporaneous society we have, first, demography, or the study of social populations; second, social psychology, and the culture-studies of comparative