Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/608

 $88 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

life. For example, toward the end of the eighteenth century, and at the beginning of the nineteenth, the conception prevailed of a natural and spontaneous order of societies, obedient to the invariable laws, which science must be satisfied with knowing, and which politics must free from all artificial hindrance to abso- lute liberty of action. It is only in later times that the social order has been regarded as naturally variable, that is to say, as a relative, evolving order. This more correct theory will neces- sarily transform social politics into its image. Beginning with this time, sociology may be considered as scientifically estab- lished, that is to say, established in possession of its own domain and its own method.

In sociology, as in every other natural science, we have to study the phenomena which are presented to our investigations as a mass. Therefore, as medical students proceed with an organism submitted to them, or as an infant with a doll which awakens its first curiosity, so in a similar manner, but on a larger and more complex scale, have we, in our past researches, begun by tearing our doll to pieces ; we have proceeded to its dissec- tion, to its completest possible analysis. Our first and most gen- eral observation has been that every society is a combination of two elements : First, an environment, to which I have given the name land, but which is composed of all the inorganic fac- tors, and also all the organic factors, of nature, with the excep- tion of man. The study of this environment in its relationships with the second element, population, may be made the subject of a special science, social mesology. The second element is the human population, that is to say, that division of organized beings, those mammiferous animals, belonging to the order of primates, to the family of bimana, which certain determined character- istics constitute a particular species. This second element may be made the subject of another special preparatory science, anthropology.

These two elements, land and population, embrace the entire domain of the antecedent sciences: they are the constitutive material whose reciprocal actions and reactions produce the social phenomena, societies.