Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/623

Rh Augusta Comte understood this very well. Accordingly, on account of the importance of the problem, he has devoted the last chapter of his Statics to its study, as a transition to dynamics. His successors, absorbed in unilateral points of view, seem to have completely lost sight of the question. This is true of the representatives of both the biological and the psychological schools of sociology; and yet, guided by biology and psychology, sciences in which this problem is one of the fundamental questions, they ought to see a priori that the same problem presents itself, under special conditions, to sociology.

For other reasons than those which led Auguste Comte to end his Statics with the study of the limits of variation, we believe that we should make this subject the first problem of the general structure of societies, after that of the social aggregate considered as a mass, with which we have just been engaged. We consider it at this point for reasons of methodology. In fact, in order to form a correct idea of a superorganism, such as the social body, in a static state, it is necessary, in the first place—while passing from the simplest cases relating to the constitutive factors and, consequently, first of all, to inorganic nature, and advancing gradually to the more complicated and more special cases relating to biological organisms with their biopsy chic derivations, and finally to social superorganisms—to determine what are the general and special conditions of equilibrium of each of these natural states or aggregates, and, above all, what are the conditions which at any moment limit and determine their mass and their forms. We have already indicated certain general conditions of their internal equilibrium from the point of view of the mass. It is now necessary to complete these ideas by bringing to light the relationships which result from these internal and external conditions, and to show what are the constant, necessary limits within which this equilibrium may oscillate or vary. We shall see that this study of the limits of variation in general will lead us to the philosophical interpretation of the more special case of the social limits of variation, and of the most particular case of all, the limits of variation of the so-called political boundaries of societies. May