Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/677

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 66 1

second place, the smaller local societies whose union forms a larger society, preserve at first their separate organizations, and then lose them as the effect of a long-continued co-operation. A common organization commences by propagating itself in each of the parts. Finally, in the third place, their topographical limits become effaced at the same time that the new administrative limits of the common organization replace them. But the attention of the eminent sociologist has been too exclusively fixed upon a single sort of boundaries, namely, the political, and he has neg- lected the others, the most essential, whose action is really organic and progressive, while that of the political frontiers is essentially exclusive, prohibitive, and is characterized much more by the constraint of authority or by forced co-operation than by mutual understanding and co-operation.

Aside from this important observation, the law of progression enunciated by Herbert Spencer is almost exact; I have myself shown elsewhere that this law is corroborated by the inverse operation in the case of the social retrogression and disintegra- tion of the oriental empires of antiquity, and as will be seen in what follows, by that of the Roman empire, the Carlovingian empires, and others more recent.

Beginning with the Graeco-oriental civilization, as its historic facts and institutions are better known to us, the great leading political doctrines and especially those relative to the frontiers become apparent. However, as always happens in the meta- physical period of all philosophy, to the extent that the facts thus far appear clear and significant to us, to that extent will they be in part obscured by attempts at systematic co-ordination, the basis for which does not always conform to the exact and complete observa- tion of the reality. What is likely to prevail in social science for a long time, and indeed increasingly, is the false method which consists in noticing only the facts which are the most salient in the sense that they are the most superficial and hence the most striking. It will be especially political phenomena proper, in reality the most complex, and deserving to be thoroughly investi- gated and analyzed, which will then serve as the instrument of interpretation, instead of their own interpretation being first