Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/514

 494 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

can be reduced to two factors, which we may consider as simple to the extent that they are sociological facts : land and popula- tion. In the first we have included the entire environment, the inorganic as well as the vegetable and the animal, excepting the human species ; the latter constitutes the second element of every society.

Land and population are both composite. However, the analysis of their elements is not within the domain of sociology, but belongs to that of the psychical sciences, the biological sci- ences, or the physical sciences in general. Sociology rests upon all of these sciences ; societies themselves are the combined products of the phenomena corresponding to these sciences; but sociology has precisely for its subject only the results of these combinations; it is neither physics, biology, nor psychology; it is a science whose domain extends to particular combinations and even to all these combinations added together; it is a com- bination of their combinations.

Thus, by constituting itself a new foundation outside of its direct subordination to psychology and biology, sociology con- nects itself with the ensemble of inorganic philosophy. In the sociology of Comte, man and his environment are considered as if one were the author and the other were the theater of the social drama; in our sociology, the environment and man enter into a superior melange, whose product is society ; in our view, without the theater, no humanity ; without humanity, no theater. The dualistic conception of social structure and social life advanced by Auguste Comte has resulted necessarily in a per- sistent antagonism between two principal schools, one of which accords more importance to environment, the other to man, especially to intellectual man. It is thus that the distinction between body and soul as a continuation of the distinction between nature and man tends to the consideration of man as the king of creation and the soul as the sovereign of the body- Our sociology is different in this respect from that of Comte ; it is essentially monistic.

Societies are, then, the product of a higher combination of these two elements : land and population. This combination,