Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/692

 678 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

We now have a new form of this doctrine of objectification, differing in nothing from the old forms, except that instead of humanity or society being called the only reality it is the state that is so regarded. The distinction between society and the state, however, is not clearly drawn, as may be seen from the following passage, which embodies the theory :

Instead of the genesis of society from individuals, what has taken place is the genesis of individuals from society; .... man did not make the state but the state made man .... it is an institution that existed before the human species was formed and was the instrument by which the human species was developed; .... the state includes society just as any entity includes all its parts."

The author of this remarkable theory claims to be an ortho- dox Darwinian, and calls most sociologists anti-Darwinian, in- cluding those who are biological specialists and have sought to show the non-biological sociologists what Darwin really taught. It is a pity therefore that he could not have been contemporary with the great biologist in order to have told him how "species" were formed and developed, at least the "human species." That the "state" underlies the origin of species would certainly have been new to Darwin. That this "institution" is not confined to the "human species," but is of earlier animal origin, is, however, made clear in other passages, for example :

The state [which is here called a genus!], an integration that took place in the animal stock ancestral to the human species. All existing forms of the state have been evolved from primordial forms existing anterior to the formation of the human species. The state is the unit, of which all social structure and individual human existence are the differentiation. The state is a psychic unity and it is apprehensible only as it is objectified in institutions*"

Now certain sociologists have proposed some highly meta- physical and even absurd theories, and have "objectified" human- ity and society in ways that would have pleased a Scaliger, but none of them have ever approached this new doctrine as a speci- men of mediaeval ontology. Yet its author is one of those who characterize sociology as a "pseudo-science" that has made a

^Amer. Joum. Social., VoL XV, September, 1909, p. 248. ^Ibid., p. 255.