Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/124

 I 10 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

group can be found coexisting all the types of culture traversed by man in his ascent from savagery. As an illustration of this grandiose "Law of Parallelism" he adduces the fact that older and inferior agencies of transportation pack mule, stage coach, sailing vessel persist alongside of later and higher agencies. Alas for hollow phrases, the explanation of the fact lies in quite another quarter ! In every society there are transportation routes of every degree of importance. On routes of little traffic the earlier and technically inferior means of carriage, the pack train or the stage coach, is economically superior and is therefore retained. Hence the diversity.

But go deeper yet. In weaving or metal working or any branch of manufacture we do not find primitive appliances sur- viving as we do in transportation. Why is this ? Simply because the agent of transportation produces a service and not a commodity. Seeing that a service must always be supplied by an agency on the spot, the Eastern four-track railroad cannot supplant the Arizona mule team in the same way that the Minne- apolis flour mill supplants the local grist mill.

From the law that the embryo of a creature recapitulates in its development the entire life history of the species Lilienfeld infers analogically that the individual in his development from childhood passes through the culture epochs traversed by human society. But is this sound ? The embryo recapitulates the development history of its species from force of heredity. As Haeckel puts it, "Phylogeny is the mechanical cause of ontogeny." Now the course of historical development in no wise determines personal development. The boy does not camp out because his ancestors did so in Caesar's time. Racial experiences of cave-dwelling, hunt- ing and barter cannot get into the blood. The correspondence, if it exists, can be explained only by assuming that the stages of social ascent are determined by the stages of mental evolution ; that culture epochs answer to the gradations in the intellectual life of mankind ; that the thinking of savages is child-like, of barbarians is boy-like, of civilization is man-like. It is vain, however, to correlate closely the actual course of evolution of a society with intellectual development, seeing that so many other