Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/126

 112 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

coined money, and credit, of pastoral feudalism, plantation slavery, and the wage system. The slow growth of religion, learning, and literature is due simply to lack of numbers, of intercourse, of leisure, and of cities. The irregularity of sex relations in a colony is not an echo of primitive times, but the consequence of the lack of white women and the abundance of native women. There is no " law " discernible here save the law that, for colony as well as for mother country, the increase of population relatively to resources is a prime cause of social evolution.

In searching for the law of social decadence De Greef, instead of interrogating the history of declining nations, makes wide excursions intc biology and psychology. He is struck by the law that the organs and characters recently acquired by a species are less stable and more liable to disappear than the older parts more deeply rooted in heredity. Something very similar is true of the mind. It appears that in mental disease, senility, asphyxia, or dissolution, the higher, more complex, and more special fac- ulties disappear before the lower, simpler, and more automatic processes. As Ribot puts it: " Mental dissolution follows the inverse order of evolution, the more complex voluntary mani- festations ceasing before the simpler, and these before the automatic actions."

Extended to society this principle yields the law that those traits and institutions most special, complex, and recently acquired are the first to disappear when social decadence sets in. Now, is there really anything at all in this law ? It is true that the later- acquired practices and institutions are unstable until they have become fixed in the custom of the folk. Nevertheless, in not all societies is custom strong. Where it is strong, the more recently adopted institutions may be the last to be surrendered, because they are most suited to present needs ; whereas the more ancient institutions, being already partly obsolescent, are the first to go when the strain comes. Adversity is a test of the old rather than of the recent.

Nor does the law seem to apply, as De Greef supposes, to the various orders of social facts. A religion begins with a faith and later adds thereunto a liturgy. But when the religion