Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/664

 648 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

that it always remains the same (see my Rasscnkampf), I could not avoid recognizing the superiority of Ward's conception of nature, in accordance with which social development might lead us through a transition from the " stone age " of social science, in which we are living today " like real savages," into an industrial period of social science, in which men would look back with horror upon our present civic condition.

II

The American rubbed his hands with pleasure. He had not made the excursion to Graz in vain. His highest satisfaction, as he con- stantly repeats, is " to publish his ideas."

In this case he had succeeded in bringing them home to a Euro- pean sociologist whose work had already been translated into English in America. Yet he was not content with victoriously storming this one position. He had something else on his heart. He had made up his mind to assault another position which I had supposed to be safely fortified. In this case, too, the assumption was founded upon a view of the essence of the process of nature which he undertook to prove untenable. This was my " polygenesis." In my Rasscnkampf (1883) I had proposed the hypothesis that the human race, which presents to us yet a large collection of rational types, is derived from a large number of originally heterogeneous hordes and stocks, and that from the earliest beginnings, scattered over the earth in their original abodes, they had differed from each other. I supported the hypothesis in this way: The known history of mankind shows us everywhere a development from a multiplicity of heterogeneous ethnic elements to larger aggregations of people and to great nation- alities. When we remember that natural processes always occur in similar ways, we cannot assume that this process manifested in known history can have been reversed in prehistoric times ; that is, we cannot assume that in earlier times the process had followed the reverse course from a homogeneous unity to an ever greater differen- tiation ; we must rather assume that then, as since, the process was always from heterogeneous variety to a constantly decreasing num- ber of larger aggregates. " That is impossible ! " said Ward. " No natural scientist, no zoologist, can agree with such an hypothesis. It is utterly unscientific, and for the following reasons: The human skeleton, as well as the muscular and nervous systems, presents in .-ill the races in the world such correspondence that it leaves no room for