Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/283

 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS 2JI

They seem to me to be profoundly true ; at the same time they seem to me to stand in need of being complemented by some others.

According to my own conception of this science, a genuine sociology must take account not only of all the social phenomena, which have their origin, so to say, in the action of individuals, but also of these social phenomena which have their origin in society itself : those phenomena, I mean, which result from the very existence of a society and from the consciousness which that society has of itself and of its own tendencies, purposes, and ideals. The true sociologist there- fore will have before his mind from the beginning the conception of society as something which is not merely the medium in which things happen, not merely the environment and theater for the play of individual actions, but as itself an actor or agent, and an agent which consciously reacts upon itself.

I would submit, therefore, that sociology must take cognizance of all those phenomena which are not explicable merely by a reference to the action of individuals as such, but which must be explained ( i ) by a reference to those laws of reciprocal action according to which certain psychological conditions at the one part are set up by certain psychological actions exercised at the other states of consciousness determining states of consciousness through the medium of society ; and (2) by a reference to those laws of self- reaction, or the reflexive action of the (social) self upon itself, by which it comes that the collective con- sciousness realizes certain ideas by the very fact of conceiving them. In other words, sociology, as it appears to me, views its subject-matter under the two collective processes of mutual determinism and auto-determinism. It seeks to give an account of the functions and the organs of the social being : their origins, their forms, the consciousness which they have of themselves, and the reactions resulting from the fact of that consciousness. Of course it will be necessary, in following this quest, to separate and allow for the material particularities or the special historical relations of given social facts, and also to leave out of view the moral value of their ends this question belonging properly to the science of ethics.

It will be seen then that the most essential characteristic of the social state is, as I regard it, this : that of being submitted to a continual course of modification by the process of its own ideas and ideals of itself, that of involving a continuous determinism and trend of the idea-forces and of sentiment-forces, while at the same time we may also say that it is in a perpetual act and state of auto-determination. This conception of the play of idea-forces (to use a term which I applied here a long while ago) seems to me to be too little taken into account by sociologists and philosophic thinkers : yet it affords us, for the study of society, a point of view which is indispensable and complementary to all the others. It allows us also to recognize a certain kind of liberty as belonging to society in the exercise of its higher functions. This liberty, however, is not necessarily to be understood as meaning what is called free will. I only mean to say that society is not at any time a thing made and finished by other or vanished agencies, but is itself a living organization which, in the exercise of its higher functions, is perpetually in the act of making itself. And from this process of social auto-determinism there results an ever-increasing flexibility of function, and even of structure, which in turn throws open a way into an infinity of variation.

If this view be correct, it will not do for us to follow in the steps of Comte and Spencer and transfer, bodily and ready-made, the conceptions and the methods of the natural sciences into the science of society. For here the fact of conscious- ness entails a reaction of the whole assemblage of social phenomena upon themselves, such as the natural sciences have no example of. Yet the complexity of the determinism exercised by this reactive function does not hinder it from being a determinism all the same : an extremely fluid determinism, it is true, and highly susceptible to disturbing influence, pressure, or impact ; but yet subject to the law of causation and consequently involving a small number of fundamental laws of determination, and a much larger number of secondary laws. Those laws will be found to have affinities in two diverging directions on the one side will be those with an affinity to biological, and on the other side those with an affinity