Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/614

 594 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

steppes with an irresistible, although blind, uniformity and cohesiveness.

This law, that every society implies the spontaneous and simultaneous production of the whole series of social phenomena, is only apparently contradictory to the law of the filiation of the same phenomena, which was set forth in Part I, and to that of the filiation of functions and organs set forth in Part II, of L introduction a la sociologie. In fact the constant, necessary coexistence in every aggregate of all the social characteristics is, in rudimentary societies, a confused, homo- geneous, coexistence ; that is to say, the superior phenomena, and especially their organs, are not yet differentiated, and will be differentiated only in succession. Thus the aesthetic, intellectual, moral, juridic, and political activities of rudi- mentary societies are manifested only as they are involved in the economic and genetic structure and life. This is all the more true as each of the primary social properties gives spontaneous birth, in its own special domain, to the entire series of subsequent properties. In this way, there is a sexual, artistic, scientific, moral, juridic, and even political, activity which is purely economic. Whatever may be the form assumed in time and space by the social aggregates, all, without exception, include the entire series of social properties, whether these aggregates are amorphous hordes, tribes, clans, families, cities, nations, or con- federations of states ; whether the aggregate is the vast human society or the smallest special society formed contractually according to the provisions of civil or commercial law; whether it is a professional syndicate or humanity. There is no contra- diction between the law of primitive and persistent homogeneity and the law of successive differentiation. The constancy and the necessity of all the social properties in every aggregate, how- ever rudimentary it may be, are, on the contrary, the expla- nation harmonizing the one law with the other.

Every fragment of social matter is, then, a complete social aggregate, so long as this fragment is not reduced to a single human unit, or to a portion of land without human units. It is complete because, from the mere fact of the juxtaposition of the