Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/522

 502 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

such as marriage, paternity, filiation, adoption, guardianship, and so on, which are not forms organized by the biologic factors, but are social phenomena. In brief, whatever M. Worms thinks of it, my classification of social phenomena is complete, and, fur ther, the number of classes cannot be reduced without causing useless confusion.

Already, in the course of our work, the fact has appeared that in social morphology the logical and lineal classification is more and more subordinate to the simultaneous and correlative quality. Even in the first part of the Introduction, we showed that the repetition of the same social activities in directions which become more regular and constant gives rise to social functions which become integrated into social organs or social institutions. In the constitution of these organs there exists the same order of logi- cal and natural filiation as for the phenomena, but with this dif- ference, that the organs are already the particular syntheses of all the social phenomena; the lineal, hierarchic series is here mingled with a general combination of all the elements in the hierarchic order, and is therefore attenuated and reduced by an order of equivalence, each element concurring in the service of the whole, to which all the agents, especially the simplest and most general, are useful and indispensable.

Let us repeat here again that it is not necessary to attach to these expressions, functions, and organs any strict biological sense, or especially to deduce sociological conclusions from cer- tain analogies. Nevertheless, these expressions facilitate our comprehension of the true nature of social institutions. Although there is no reason here for an absolute assimilation, the super- organisms are not totally distinct from ordinary organisms. Thus, as the more and more regular passage of nervous excita- tion by the same path explains the formation of nerve, so the more and more regular transportation of men and utilities serves to explain the formation of routes, from the natural foot-path to the railroad. Yet the route is not a nerve. The latter does not serve especially to transport elements of nutrition, although it transmits the offers and the orders ; the post-office and the tele- graph, with their many stations, are in this relation more anala- gous to a nerve than are roads.