Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/601

Rh conception borrowed from the physical sciences; yet even Comte continues to use the latter expression. In Germany, Herder and Krause represent an analogous philosophic transformation.

In this passage from the inorganic conception to the biologic conception of societies, the preponderant place is still accorded to the idea of order; progress is considered as the development of order. In fact, moreover, with Comte this is just what dynamics tends to mean. In the bio-social doctrines, the static point of view and the dynamic aspect are equally important. The first is more simple, but more fundamental; the second, more characteristic, but subordinate. In biology the simultaneity of phenomena is more important than their succession.

It was otherwise as soon as the progress of psychology completed the point of view of the biological school. Already, even with Comte, ideological sociology, his law of the three states, is psychic, but psycho-collective, and even his social statics is of the same nature.

Eventually, as in the case of Herbert Spencer, the successive aspect of psychology becomes more and more predominant. The evolutionary conception dominates to the extent of almost completely absorbing the static aspect. It is no longer the organ that determines and explains the function, or the structure society, but the function determines and explains the organ. This is evolution itself. It is also proper to notice here the exaggerated and too exclusive tendency of a derivative sociological school which assimilates the life of societies to an entirely psychic life, either recognizing a real resemblance between the nervous system and the social system (Lilienfeld), or developing in a one-sided way both the resemblances and differences between collective psychology and psycho-physiology (E. Tarde, Lebon, Sighele, Simmel, L. F. Ward, Giddings, Baldwin, Izoulet).

This evolution of sociology was, however, both logical and natural. Integral and confused in the beginning, it endeavored successively to explain social phenomena by the laws of the antecedent sciences, keeping pace with the advancing