Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/524

 504 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

It follows that, in last analysis, all social life can be reduced to a movement, to a change of place of the human units and of utilities, that is to say, of the more or less numerous parts of the two factors combined by land and sociology.

This observation, supposing it to be as exact as I think, should be of the highest importance for the general philosophy of the sciences, because it should permit us to perceive more or less clearly that sociology itself will some time be related to a universal mechanical law well understood from the purely philo- sophical point of view. This philosophical monism will not be able to treat social phenomena simply by themselves, according to their distinctive character and their particular laws.

The fact that in last analysis all social life can be reduced to movement, to a change of place of human units and of utilities, corresponds to the fact that every social structure can be reduced to a displacement, a movement, a new combination of land and population. It is this that we actually observe in the economic activity of the most rudimentary populations, which live by hunting, fishing, and gathering fruits, nuts, etc. All their economic activity consists in a movement, in approaching natural utilities, in bringing these utilities together. Here circu- lation, consumption, production are only one ; they are blended in a single movement, in a circulatory movement which involves at the same time the two other phenomena, consumption and production, which are not differentiated until later. However, consumption and production in their distinct forms, in the highest distinct forms they are subsequently able to attain, nevertheless always remain as the two poles of the same sphere. At the same time, this statement explains a fact which I think no one disputes, namely, that the circulatory phenomena always tend to become organized, that is to say, socialized, before the phenomena relating to consumption, and especially before the phenomena of production, which are the most complex and the most special of all economic phenomena. Among productive phenomena those activities relating to industry, properly so called, become organized before agricultural industry.

The objection has been made that hunting, fishing, and