Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/613

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 593

viduals is formed by the environment. It is composed, not only of individuals, but of individuals and the environment. Society is a superior form of the whole of nature, a necessary form of conservation and adaptation. The solitary tree dies in the same climate in which the forest endures and enlarges its extent, but the tree and the forest are inseparable from the earth.

A second constant necessary law of every social aggregate is that the appearance of the phenomenon called society involves the spontaneous production of the entire series of phenomena or properties that belong to the social matter: the economic, genetic, aesthetic, scientific, ethical, juridic, and political properties. All societies, even the most rudimentary, even those limited by the most special aim, manifest, by the mere fact of their formation as aggregates, these seven classes of properties. This statement is incontestable with respect to the first two properties. Nowhere, neither in prehistoric peoples nor in inferior populations, living or extinct, do we see verified the hypothesis of the human indi- vidual living exclusively by his isolated efforts, and reproducing his kind without at least intermittent sexual relations. We like- wise observe on every hand certain physico-psychical manifesta- tions in connection with the successess obtained, or the failures sustained, in the military, economic, or genetic life ; a certain tendency to manifest joys and sorrows, and even to regulate them ; to embellish either the habitation and the instruments of labor and warfare, or the human person itself ; everywhere the relationships with the internal and external environment give rise to certain beliefs beliefs which are at least empirical, whether true or false, and which are soon unconsciously and unintentionally systematized. These beliefs assist more or less in the guidance of the members of the group, and become fixed in collective customs which involve approbation or blame, and, under certain circumstances, a support or a repression, which is also collective. Everywhere, in fact, the whole of the aggre- gate submits to a general direction, conscious or not, organ- ized or diffused, which was itself produced only by the most general internal and external necessities. So it is with those bands of wolves which are guided like a blind force through the