Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/132

118 repeat themselves under different skies and in diverse settings. There is, moreover, in ethical, religious, and juridical development, an assimilating subjective factor working along with external factors. But we cannot venture so far as did Comte generalizing from his extensive studies in the history of the sciences. Had his acquaintance with the metamorphoses of institutions been wider, he would not have concluded that as Mill puts it "the order of human progression in all respects will be a corollary deducible from the order of progression in the intellectual convictions of mankind."

For there are classes of social phenomena that are more objectively determined, and these do not easily lend themselves to laws of succession. Data vastly fuller than Comte had at his disposal force upon us the conviction that the coarse structural facts of society do not obey the lead of mind. The industrial, domestic, military, political and ecclesiastical institutions do not follow the same course for all peoples, but develop in thralldom to outer conditions—in the final analysis, to the environment, physical or human. Desert, steppe, forest, valley, seaport—each working, be it noted, not directly but through the demographic and economic factors, moulds a social type which will undergo certain transformations of its own. Then, too, much depends upon access to alien social groups. The presence or absence of other societies and cultures decides whether a people shall stagnate or progress, be militant or industrial, develop as a simple or as a composite society.

We may, in fact, think of society as developing with reference to two foci, the subjective and the objective. The unfolding of the mind being apparently the same among different peoples, those social phenomena which lie nearest the subjective focus will exhibit in their transformations a certain logic and regularity. Environments, on the other hand, impose modes of existence extremely unlike, and therefore in differently situated social groups those social phenomena lying nearest the objective focus will undergo not parallel but divergent evolution.

Moreover, owing to the fact that from the very unity of the mind every culture stage presents itself as a whole, in which each