Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/529

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 59

ideal, just as music does. Music, in spite of its vaguer character, nevertheless also succeeds in represening our most complex sentiments, and in expressing the emotional tonality always inherent even in our most abstract ideas. Literature, with its double instrument, speech and writing, in a word, by means of language, places art in direct relationship with the intellectual aspect of the collective psychology. By means of literature, oral and written language, whose point of departure is gesture and mimicry, and mimetic or picture-writing, whose point of arrival is the apparently purely conventional signs derived from the same, language joins art to science and to the collective intellectual psychology. Language is, then, an eminently social organ. Auguste Comte, in his Static Sociology, has accorded to it an important place, and if, as represented by adverse criti- cism, I have spoken of it only incidentally in my first two vol- umes of the Introduction, this was because, in the first place, it seemed to me to be included as a constitutive element in the description, like that above, which I there made of literature; and because, in the second place, to tell the truth, the philoso- phy of language does not appear to me to be as yet sufficiently elucidated. This second reason is partly, and perhaps wholly, due to the imperfection of my own linguistic attainments, which do not permit me to treat specially this important problem, Besides, from the point of view of the general structure of socie- ties, it is sufficient for me to point out, as I have just done, that literature, both oral and written, is a connective organ join- ing art to scientific knowledge, which is the essential subject of collective psychology, properly speaking.

So far as collective psychology is concerned (aside from the consideration, too often overlooked, that no social phenomenon, not even an economic phenomenon, is exclusively either mate- rial or idealogical, and that, consequently, everything related to sociology, by the very reason of its constitutive factors, is inor- ganic, organic, and physic), we may accept the grand divisions adopted by Auguste Comte (religion, metaphysics, and positive philosophy) as representing the successive and progressive stages of the co-ordination and the evolution of social psychism.