Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/678

 662 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY

made apparent through that of their more simple and fundamental constituent elements. It is thus, in the same order of errors, that the vulgar apply the term phenomena to what is extraordinary and monstrous, and indeed it is such things which strike their attention while normal occurrences are unnoticed. That which is essential to note, on the contrary, is the usual facts of life, the elementary and ordinary conditions. It was thus, however, with all the sciences, and those of the social life cannot escape this stage of empirical elaboration. It was thus that the study of all the social frontiers was neglected, except that of the political frontiers; they interpreted these from a point of view absolutely outside of all the conditions which intervene in their formation, their deformation, and their transformation ; the most profound phenomena of the social life, namely, those relating to the nutri- tive life of societies, without which their conservation, their exist- ence, and their growth, as well as their decadence are inexplicable, were left in the most profound obscurity. Although the internal realities were at least unconsciously expressed in a naive form in the great religious codes, such as the Bible and the laws of Manu, the sense of reality disappeared with the first attempts of political rationalism. Social science was from the very first a govern- mental art; it formed part of the education of governors, of sovereigns, princes, castes, or classes. Later and up to our day, the theory of the state, and also that of the frontiers, has fallen into the hands of the jurists, and particularly, of those of inter- national law. This lot was also precisely that of the so-called political economy before its constitution into a social science. Now the evolution of politics and of economics is explained in the same manner; no social science could become positive before the constitution of the economic science whose domain is the field of culture of all the other manifestations of collective existence. International law, like the theorist in pure politics, has been hin- dered and entangled in the contemplation of the frontiers of the state; never has any representative of the great schools, and there were and are still men of genius among them, been able to define frontiers, nor with better reason, to give their philosophy. Ho\V strange must seem, to those who persist in the same beaten path,