Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/203

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY 189

hill tribes of India, or the little human clusters in the islets of Oceania ? What of the Japanese, the Javanese, the Coreans, the Afghans ? What of the early Celts, the Germans, the Slavs, the tribes of the Caucasus ? Each of these has a development and a fate of its own ; and if its language, its arts, or its speculations be partly borrowed, it nevertheless passes through stages of industry, law, and government which are determined by local and special conditions and not by foreign influences. Here are (or rather were, for some have sunk into the sand, and others have emptied into larger rivers) so many social streams, each with its own slope and cataracts and fluctuations betraying nothing of the ebb and flood we have gauged in the Nile of our European civilization.

It is the signal merit of Mr. Spencer that, like Aristotle, he per- ceived that humanity has toiled upward in separate bands and along many paths. By heavily ballasting his sociological theses with facts gathered from numerous remote and outlandish societies, by sternly denying us the panoramic effects so dear to the philoso- phers of history, he broke the spell of the near, and taught us how vast and how varied is the field of social evolution. It is now clear to all that the independent linguistic, religious, political, and domes- tic evolutions brought to light are sufficiently numerous to afford a fair basis for comparison and induction. By assembling facts of a given kind from every society past and present of which we have any knowledge, Letourneau has been able to build up his great studies in marriage, slavery, commerce, education, and religion. x These, although they are not sociology, are so many collections of sorted materials ready to the hand of the inductive sociologist.

In the last paper it was shown how futile is the endeavor to establish laws of succession based on the parallelism in all socie- ties of any special development, e. g,, domestic or political, taken in its entirety. Since there is but one sequence of this sort for each society, the number of cases cannot exceed the number of societies ; but as the known societies are under very dissimilar conditions, their particular developments are not sufficiently parallel to yield a valid law of succession. The error here lies