Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/643

Rh words, the emphasis here is upon the organic concept, not upon biological analogies in formulating the concept. Not merely in sociology, but in every department of knowledge, the organic concept is the most distinctive modern note. It has been a serious oversight and blunder to confound the organic concept with the nonessential device of employing biological analogies when using the concept. Accidents in connection with this merely mechanical detail have been magnified by some thinkers into essentials, and misrepresented by others as the substance of the subject-matter in question, instead of merely means of finding out and reporting a certain portion of reality. The most intimate and complex and constructive coherence of elements that we discover previous to our study of society is the coworking of part with part in vital phenomena. Men who wanted to understand the social reality more precisely began, about a generation ago, to make systematic use of ascertained vital relationships as provisional symbols of societary relationships. In general it has been true from the beginning that the so-called biological sociology has not been biological at all except in its figurative modes of expression. Men have detected apparent analogies between better understood vital processes and less understood societary processes. They have said virtually: "So long as terms of these vital processes put us in the way of approaching more truth about societary processes, let us use them as means to that end." Following this clue, descriptive analyses and many interpretations of social relations have been worked out in biological terms. It is not absolutely certain that any single writer who has been taken seriously by the sociologists has ever been a "biological sociologist" in any other sense than the foregoing. There have been many lapses into linguistic usage that prima facie meant a very fantastic literalism. In general, however, the use of biological figures has amounted to about this: There are functional relationships between men in association that are analogous with functional relationships between parts of living bodies. No analogies seem to be closer on the whole to the