Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/831

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY

811

co-operation, to simultaneous and similar movements, unpre- meditated at first, which must not be confounded with imitation, although the latter is partly derived from them. This is the first sociological explanation from the psychical point of view of the phenomena which psychology properly speaking has noted under the designation of sympathetic fears, panics, imitations of actions, gestures, habits, and common pleasures. But it has not led to the more general concept of force and movement. We know also that all these factors of sociability have been rendered still more efficacious by the development of the aesthetic emotions, and especially of the affections which proceed natu- rally from the relation of the sexes and from the parental relation- ship, both maternal and paternal. As for imitation, it is explained by the natural collection of individuals and groups which have acquired characteristics advantageous for their preservation and development. In all these cases the consciousness of resistance to the internal or external environment has formed the departure for both individual and collective consciousness. This conscious- ness, whether obscure or clear, of resistance and effort, gives a collective existence to the first human groups and co-operates with more special and more complex social factors which we will discuss further in the explanation of the philosophy of limits. If, then, limits of some kind, narrow or coincident with our planet itself, are the necessary and constant condition of every social structure, we can assert that besides mathematical, physi- cal, chemical, and biological forces, all of which, as we have seen, are limited, there are also limits among the psychical forces, both individual and social. Social statics is a more special and complex division of universal statics. The latter gives the phil- osophical explanation and proof of the former.

G. DE GREEF.

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM.

[To be continued^