Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/547

 SOCIAL GENESIS 533

language, as already said, imperfectly expressed this middle sense by various uses of the passive voice, but modern languages, developed more under the influence of scientific conceptions, have partly supplied the defect by the almost universal use of a reflective form. The Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Ger- man, and Russian languages all make extensive use of this form, and the Russian, which has many of the elements of the Greek besides its characters, resorts to this method even more than the Romance languages. The English is perhaps the poorest of all modern languages in this respect, but there are many ways in which we are able to avoid the implication of an agent in natural phenomena. We borrow largely from other tongues and possess many terms to express simple becoming. Although there is no Anglo-Saxon equivalent in use in English for the strong German word werden, still the advance in scien- tific thought towards the conception of a self-existent, self- adjusting, and self-active universe has nowhere been greater than in English-speaking countries.

Progress in this direction has taken place somewhat in the order of the complexity of the phenomena considered, and the external agent conceived by Kepler was first eliminated from astronomical ideas. Somewhat later it disappeared from physi- cal and chemical conceptions, and it has now nearly abandoned the field of vital activities. It still lingers in the realm of mind, and anthropomorphic conceptions are still dominant in social thinking. There is, however, in this last department, as was seen in the eighth paper of this scries, and as will be more fully shown in the eleventh, a scientific basis for the idea, in conceiving man as an intelligent agent modifying his environment. In other words, while tin-re is no more room in sociology than in any of the simpler sciences for a theo-teleology, there does exist an anthropo-teleology ' which becomes an increasingly important factor as intelligence advam

In the present paper it is proposed to ignore this factor completely as possible, and to concentrate the attention upon

1 Dynamic Sociology, Vol. I, p. 29.