Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/131

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY 1 1 7

static epoch, when there is great inequality of economic opportunity coinciding with great inequality of possessions, and that it becomes diffused during a dynamic epoch when the doors of opportunity stand open to all. Suppose Professor Giddings is right in declaring that political forms will be coercive if society embraces marked diversities and inequalities in its membership, liberal if between its members there is great moral and mental resemblance. Suppose Gumplowicz is right in asserting that the state is most oligarchic and coercive just after a conquest, and that as the assimilation of conquerors and conquered proceeds it becomes more mild and liberal. No one granting any of these suppositions will venture, as does Letourneau, to contend for a fixed sequence in political forms. For if political evolution is at the mercy of general social evolution, it will not be the same for all peoples unless general social evolution is the same for all peoples.

But is general social evolution the same for all peoples ?

There is, to be sure, one great cause of uniformity in the order of experiences in different societies. Seeing that the human mind is at bottom everywere the same, those develop- ments which have inner rather than outer causes are likely to run parallel, even with peoples remote from one another in space or time, to follow, as it were, a series of logical steps. A science mathematics or astronomy, for instance pursues everywhere the same course. The same problems present themselves to all, and are solved, if solved they are, in much the same order. How- ever varied their surroundings all tribes flounder through anim- ism, invent similar myths, or travel the same route of speculation. It is not by chance that in the early developments of speech, of sex-life, of the practical arts, of ceremonies, symbols, and games, we come across those deeply worn paths which Tyler has called "ethnographic parallels."

Regularity, then, will naturally characterize those species of social phenomena which are functions of man's thinking, and respond least to outer circumstance. The linguistic, aesthetic, mythological, folk-lore, philosophic, scientific, and technological developments have in them too much of the subjective not to