Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/666

 650 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

nature in the several geological periods turned about, and after periods of freezing came periods of melting. The same is the case with the social process. Humanity is undoubtedly derived from a single birthplace and of common heredity. Thereupon followed a long period of development (measured by millions of years) in which the race spread in countless branches, which grew, under the influ- ence of different environment and conditions of life, into the man> races and varieties. In historical times, to be sure, the reverse process occurs, which you have correctly pictured in your Rassenkampf. The heterogeneous elements come into contact. There follows a struggle for existence as consequence of the same social integration which increasing agglomerations and assimilations bring about. In the social process, as everywhere else in nature, a long period of differ- entiations is followed by a period of integration. We live in the latter stage. This process of integration is nowhere near its end." 8 I was beaten. I stood there like a pupil who had just been thoroughly whipped by his teacher. " He may be right," I thought. When I inferred, from the forms of the social process in historical times, a polygenesis of humanity, the notion never occurred to me of geologic periods with their corsi and recorsi which Vico might have suspected. I felt the superiority of the reasons cited by the geological sociologist. At all events, I have not met in Europe such a giant of a scholar, who counts the history of mankind by hundreds of thousands of million-year periods. Almost demolished, I ventured only the question: "Then you reject my whole race-struggle theory? I drew my best arguments from the hypothesis of polygenesis. Now you are dealing with me as Hercules did with Antaeus. When you lift me from the soil of my hypothesis, all the force of my arguments dis- appears. If I cannot explain race-conflict as a phenomenon that is natural, regular, and rooted deep in the laws of the universe, must my sociological system collapse ? " " By no means," answered Ward eagerly ; " the social process of human evolution, as you present it that is, as beginning with innumerable heterogeneous hordes and progressing by means of struggle between them, and consequent assimilation, into a constantly diminishing number, or constantly

'Ward has developed this view in chap. 10 of his latest work Pur* Sociology (1903), pp. 199 ff. On his return trip from the congress in Vienna, he also delivered an address in Paris to the same effect. It was his presidential address before L'Institut international de Sociologie, and was published in the ninth volume of the Annales of that society under the title " La differenciation et 1'integration sociale."