Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/123

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY IOQ

from general causes such as the unequal fecundity of classes, races, or nations, it is evident that, until every Peter the Hermit, Gutenberg, Watt, or Napoleon is strangled in the cradle, society will never long remain in balance.

This case admirably exemplifies the danger of formulating social laws on hints from other sciences. The law may be true, yet if there is no patient digging into social facts to get at the root of the matter, i, e., to uncover the specific cause of the observed tendency, one is likely to state as valid, for all times and all societies, something that holds only since the decline of the tribal system, the advent of gunpowder, or the prevalence of machine industry.

Although during the interval between First Principles and his Principles of Sociology Mr. Spencer grew cautious in the use of analogy, and came to prefer the laws of life to the laws of matter as the key to social processes, his treatment of society as a mass rather than a consensus, as an aggregate of bodies rather than an accord of minds, had meanwhile given much encouragement to social physicists. The most extreme of these is Carey, whose maxims, "All science is one and indivisible" and "The laws of physical science are equally those of social science" would throttle sociology in its infancy. To the combina- tions of men he applies the chemical law of multiple proportions, and the physical law of the composition of forces. From the law of gravitation he deduces that the attraction of cities is directly as the mass and inversely as the distance !

Writing early in the seventies at a time when the philosophi- cal world was profoundly stirred by new and splendid generaliza- tions in the field of life, Lilienfeld seeks to bring society under biological rather than physical laws. He insists that society is a "real organism," and declares, "It is an unscientific, dualistic dogma which asserts that human society develops according to other laws than natural organisms."

Following Haeckel's thesis that among the existing species of organisms can be found types corresponding to the successive forms by which in the past the higher species developed out of a simple cell, Lilienfeld lays down the law that within any social