Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/122

 108 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Notice the fact that Mr. Spencer, after seeking to prove the preceding thesis from a plastic society would prove his present thesis from an ossified society, a tacit admission that the laws in question do not apply to all social groups. It is true that a com- munity long undisturbed is likely to exhibit crystallization and rigidity. But it is no less true that a community agitated by inventions, migration, conquest, or culture-contacts exhibits fluidity and vicariousness of function. Here there is great insta- bility of political and social position, great facility of individual ascent and descent, a rapid subversion of old fortunes by new wealth, of old classes by new groupings, of old inventions by new standards and values.

Against the proposition that in society, as elsewhere, a single cause produces a number of unlike effects (law of the multiplication of effects), there is nothing to be said.

The statement that incident forces tend to collect the like and to separate the unlike (law of segregation), is doubtless as true of people as it is of particles. Nevertheless, by implying that human segregation is the result of "incident" forces it veils the real reason why like joins with like. That the recognition of resemblance inspires a fellow-feeling which unites men into unlike groups is a psychical fact and nothing is gained by assimi- lating it with purely physical processes like the sorting of parti- cles by wind, or water, or electrical attraction.

The thesis that social evolution tends toward a more perfect equilibrium (law of equilibration) does not seem to be justified by Mr. Spencer's evidence. It is true that electricity and steam are facilitating the adjustment of economic supply to demand, but it is likewise true that the increasing use of fixed capital entails only too frequently that rupture between supply and demand which we call a commercial crisis. As for what he styles the better equilibration between the demand for government and the supply of it, i. e. t the lessening oscillation between revolution and reaction, one questions if it is at all bound up with the social process. It appears rather to be a natural consequence of the growth of capitalism on the one hand and the diffusion of knowledge on the other. To say nothing of disturbances arising