Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/602

 588 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

to speak further of the difference between Locke's contract and Rousseau's, this seems to me quite parallel' to that, which was developing at the same time, between a particular scientific law, always only a working hypothesis, and the validating principle, for example, the law of the uniformity of nature, which nobody

it is worth remarking for the benefit of Bluntschli ever at any particular time discovered among the things of experience. The sympathy of Kant, the philosopher of validating principles

or "fictions" or "categories" with Rousseau is well known. The radical character, moreover, of the standpoint of any of them of Locke, Rousseau, or Kant can be seen in the fact that naturally, that is, logically, it was contemporary with the develop- ment of the idea what shall I say? of a reserved possibility, an immanent potentiality in all things. 1 A science of working hypotheses and only formal principles was witness to a mov- ing experience, that is to say, to an intimacy between knowl- edge and life, and an amendable contract or constitution or a "responsible" government meant social and political evolution. For both Locke and Rousseau, then, as has already been asserted more or less .directly, the real state, the state to which man owed his final and unhesitating allegiance, was identical with the fact, the natural and original fact, of society ; in short, with humanity at large. It is true that such early advocates of the naturalistic theory as Burke formerly mentioned here and Blackstone were opposed to the contract theory, but for the reasons that have now been given I have to think of them as not less interpreters of the theory than opponents of it. 2 They have

"Compare the vitesse virtuelle of John Bernoulli (1667-1748) in the history of mechanics. Compare also the monadology of Leibnitz (1646-1716) with its ascrip- tion of self-activity to substance.

2 POLLOCK, in his History of the Science of Politics, chap, v, says of Blackstone : " He distinctly refuses to believe in the ' state of nature ' as a historical fact, and thereby avoids a difficulty which Locke had palliated rather than met by ingenious but weak excuses. 'Society has not its formal beginning from any convention of individuals.' Blackstone treats the family as the unit of society, and reduces the original contract, though he does not abandon the term, to the fact that men hold together in society because they cannot help it." For Blackstone surely the origi- nal social contract which rescued men from a state of nature can be but a legal fiction.