Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/392

 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Altogether apart from judgments of the actors primarily concerned, or from our own judgments, of the desirability or undesirability of changes, there is the elemental fact of per- petual transition from one order of association to another. Pos- sibly the phrase "redistribution of the elements" would better describe this condition than the term we have selected. We might enlist the term " evolution," if that had not come to be so closely associated with theories of method of change rather than with the fact of change itself. We might partially para- phrase Spencer's famous formula of evolution/ and say that one of the dynamic conditions of society is "integration of persons, and concomitant dissipation of motion." We might simply say that change is incessantly taking place in the types of associa- tion which men compose. Making the letters from A to Z represent the members of an association, we may say that the order of the letters is never long constant. Even if the asso- ciation is in the savage state, the facts of sex and age always produce among the individuals a certain rhythm, although the type of the society itself may remain constant.

With every development of individual needs beyond the crude animal interest the impulse to movement presently becomes differentiation of employments. The priest, the warrior, the artist, the food-procurer visualize the previously latent tendency to move individuals into other balance, or into other relation of forces in the combination.

Type after type of arrangements of persons have succeeded each other throughout human experience. No sooner are per- sons adjusted to each other in any form whatever as, for example, in the matriarchate than interests begin to push and pull them toward other arrangements as, for instance, the patriarchate. Perhaps if we simply say that there has been ceaseless variation of types of association we shall sufficiently indicate the reality for our present purpose.

We may single out by way of illustration those sorts of rearrangements which we are disposed to call progressive. The word "progress" is the fifth term in Lester F. Ward's famous

1 First Principles, p. 396.