Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/504

 484 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

historical periods (a truth which is admitted especially by Karl Marx) are bound together in such a way that the periods in question, not being closed to each other, necessarily have com- mon relations and laws which permit us to reduce them to a unitary structure and life.

II.

Abstract as well as concrete sociology is either static or dynamic. We prefer in place of this terminology that of general structure and general life of societies. In fact, we conceive of society as superorganic, and sociology has more direct relations with the sciences of life than with mechanics. The terms " static " and " dynamic " may be re-employed some day, pro- vided that social phenomena as well as organic phenomena are reduced to a purely mechanical and mathematical interpretation, from the monistic point of view of general philosophy; until that time the use of these expressions must be rejected, as it implies that the social facts are of less complex nature than the organic, or even the chemical and physical, facts, when, on the contrary, they are both quantitatively and qualitatively superior.

The expression "social statics" was borrowed from mechani- cal science. The first social theorists who observed that societies are mobile naturally interpreted social phenomena at first by the laws of mechanics. Then, in the case of those with whom the immobile aspect of societies was predominant, a still simpler and more general explanation was demanded from mathematics, the science of magnitudes, either arithmetic or geometric. The first legislators or social organizers were true architects, working according to pre-established plans traced conformably to lines and materials entirely susceptible of being reduced to a unit of measure or of number.

It is thus that, by an application of the law of apparent return to primitive forms, abstract sociology of the future, although under entirely different conditions, will perhaps succeed in expressing sociological laws in mechanical formulae which are themselves reducible to a general mathematical theorem or formula. Humanity appears to have traversed a scientific circle,