Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/408



The origin of society in general, that is, of association among animals, and of human society in particular, can no longer be regarded as purely a speculative question. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries social philosophers gave so many and so varied answers to this question, from the supernatural to the contract theory, that it deservedly fell into disrepute. The advances of nineteenth-century science have made it evident, however, that the problem of the origin of society is no more insoluble than the problem of the origin of species. This is not saying, of course, that there remain no unexplained elements in the problem, or that there is general agreement among all sociologists upon this question. Life in general remains a mystery to science, and as long as it does the origin of association as a phase of the life-process must remain also to a certain extent a mystery.

Fundamentally the problem of the origin of society is a biological question. The psychological sociologist, in his discussion of the problem, needs only to point out that the life-process is essentially social from the start; that is, it involves from the first the interaction of individual organisms. This interaction, while in its lowest phases purely physical, gives rise in its higher stages to that psychical interaction which we call association or society.

Life is not, and cannot be, an affair of individual organisms. The processes of both nutrition and reproduction, in all higher forms of life, involve a necessary interdependence among organisms of the same species, which, except under unfavorable conditions, gives rise to group life and psychical interaction. Society