Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/380

 368 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

sociology and natural causation, but there is also a distinction to be made between the various kinds of evolution cosmic, organic, and social or mental (the latter including the social). The difference between the integration of matter and the dissipa- tion of motion, on the one hand, and adaptation to environment, on the other, is sufficiently great to warrant no further comment. The difference between organic and social evolution is not so obvious, although of prime importance. Mr. Ward expresses the distinction in a formula to this effect : " the environment trans- forms the animal, while man transforms the environment;" 19 meaning that in organic evolution the animal is passive, while man reacts on his environment so rigorously as to change it, so that in the interaction of the two there is a constant spiral dia- lectic. Man reacts upon his environment, and by his reaction changes it; it, in turn, in its changed form reacts upon him, bringing about, not alone a change in him, but also a reaction by him ; so that, through every action of man, it is in so far changed, and so presents an ever richer and more complex front. Pro- fessor Venn, in somewhat different connection and under differ- ent circumstances, brings out practically the same point when he says that when the objects under observation are conscious individuals, any conclusion which predicts future occurrences on the basis of generalizations of past experience will be invalidated just so soon as it is published, since by that fact of publication it affects those individuals on the basis of which it was made. 20 The reason for this would be that just as soon as the conclusion is made and falls into the hands of some individual whose actions it discusses, that very consciousness of the uniformity of actions in one direction or another will add another ingredient to the causal antecedents of that action. If it tells the individual that nine out of ten men do a certain thing a fact that he has never before known it may lead him, by reason of his desire to do the conventional thing, to perform that action; when before seeing the statement he would have been inclined to do the opposite. Or, if he be an individual of the " contrary " type, he may refrain


 * Purt Sociology, p. 16. "Empirical Logic, pp. 575 ff.