Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/34

 20 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

The development of laws and customs and institutions is sub- ject to that law which is the key to the whole history of the created universe — the law of order. The creation exists for the sake of its order, says the great master of the school, Thomas of Aquin. The universe is the overflow, as it were, of the divine goodness, the manifestation and revelation and com- munication of the perfections of the Godhead.

As an infinite creation is not possible, the infinite goodness expresses itself by an indefinite and progressive diversity of created existences and relations. The multiplicity, mutual coordination, and hierarchical subordination of creatures con- stitute the order of the universe, which by this alone fulfills the object of its existence. The apparently unlimited tendency to variation which the modern theory of evolution, in all its forms, presupposes, but cannot adequately explain, expresses itself in the manifold types of civilization and the multifarious forms of human organization just as truly as in the multiplicity of animal and vegetable species, and the ever-increasing com- plexity of chemical and biological structure. Society, like nature, is normally made up of many organisms, and these, in turn, of many organs ; it is, like nature, composed of unequal elements, ever tending to still further inequality, and displaying a specializa- tion of function and an integration of structure directly propor- tional to the degree of development which they have severally attained.

But the units of which society is composed are subject, not only to physical, but to moral laws, and it is upon these that social evolution chiefly depends. All Catholics maintain, as one of the most certain and primary of verities, the liberty of the human will; the power of making an interior choice between good and evil, between right and wrong, without any sort of coercion or restraint. An act in which the will does not freely participate, by at least an implicit consent, is not, strictly speak- ing, a human act. The condition of human society is not deter- mined, therefore, by the mechanical interaction of blind forces alone, as it would be if all men were constantly the slaves of their passions. The higher reason — that attribute in which the