Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/133

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY 1 19

element acts upon' every other element; owing to the fact that the forms of industry, of family, of government, of law, of wor- ship, and of art, are sympathetically adjusted to one another, it is likely that even the forms about the subjective pole art, philoso- phy, religion, and the like will be tinged with something local and distinctive. Hence, I cannot but conclude that the devel- opment of a particular order of institutions is, in a greater or less degree, multilinear, and that the endeavor to establish in each sphere of social life a single, typical sequence of changes is bound to fail.

For a different reason we reject formulations like De Greef s law of the development of exchange, viz., that merchandise money gives way to weighed metallic money, this to coined metallic money, this in turn to the bank note, and the bank note to the clearing-house set-off. The succession here is indubitable, but have we a law ? If we raise to the dignity of a law the series of steps in the perfecting of any instrument or process, social laws will be cheap. There will be volumes of them. The history of the arts furnishes us with formulae for the evolution of the plow, the pot, the gun, the loom, the process of weaving, of smelting, of brewing, and of hundreds of other practical items. Does anyone care to make these the building stones of a science of society?

Let no one suppose that the foregoing aims to bar out true dynamic laws disclosing a chain of cause and effect. It is because an institutional form is not the cause of its successor that we cannot admit a law of succession for each aspect of social evolu- tion. But there is no objection to formulating the relation between a prime motor of social change, and the developmental process it initiates, between the leaping spark and the train of consequences it ignites. We can, therefore, welcome as a foun- dation pier of sociology the law established by Gumplowicz and Ratzenhofer that the conjugation of two societies through conquest and subjection is followed by a rapid evolution of structure, and the law of cross-fertilization adumbrated by Buckle and Tarde and formulated thus by Tiele : "All (spiritual] development, apart from the natural capabilities of men and peoples, results from the stimulus