Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/611

 ORGANIC THEORY OF SOCJETl $9?

learners, not makers of law, or by which, again, they are able to formulate the law that the life of society discloses. Simply, then, because law is nature's, not man's, or man's only as man is himself natural ; or, more particularly, because in Hume's day nature's laws were so much in evidence, government appeared to Hume as peculiarly judicial and executive instead of legisla- tive. Moreover, virtually if not literally, history has justified Hume's contention, for political evolution from monarchical to- democratic institutions seems to have proceeded on the principle that in a known law of nature man has had more certainty of freedom than in any whim of his own. In short, Hume's police theory of government was only his blind way of seeing democracy ; a way, however, that was hardly unnatural to the times, and that is fairly true to English political history in general, so devoted to an unconfessed democracy. What wonder that Hume's great biographer, Huxley, finds in his theories "a very remarkable example of political sagacity." But now, forgetting Hume, let us apply what he has taught us to our present purposes, and in the first place remember that we have found the "social contract" to be in effect only an abstraction or fiction for natural law, and then recognize that the now generally admitted duty of governments to know the natural law in the life of the people is one of the strongest forces in the evolution of an organic state or of an international union, and also since conditions do make theories in the rise and development of the organic theory.

Conditions do make theories, although in a sense theories are often in advance of conditions. Theories may reveal and formulate unconscious, or, to speak more strictly, unconfessed, or only indirectly confessed, practice. For example, again with reference to national and international life, the organic theory implies, or even avows, the coextension of the territories and histories of all nations. Mathematically, 1 of course, this is

1 " Mathematically," unless one goes behind the returns of mathematics and finds in the science something more than quantities or than quantitative abstractions. Quantitatively it is absurd to speak of the coextension of parts, spatial or temporal, geographical or historical ; but qualitatively it almost goes without saying. Not stati- cally, but actively or dynamically, parts, that is, territories or histories, are coextensive, and he who runs may read this even in mathematics. Indeed, the calculus, dependent