Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/216

 202 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Mr. Spencer, in his Descriptive Sociology, has listed the institu- tions and structures of vanished peoples, these being the hard, durable parts of a society, that can most easily be recovered from the records. But of the processes that brought them forth we have no hint. Just as the cave breccia yields us fossil bones, but not fossil flesh, so the past renders up its institutions, but not its social life. Mr. Spencer, attacking the problems of social evolution rather those of socionomy had to work much with bygone societies, and hence missed many processes which later observers have detected in the life about us. This is why he makes his institutions arise and evolve almost without the inter- vention of the human will. His phraseology seems to endow them with inherent tendencies to become this or that.

A product is, moreover, discovered sooner than the process that lies behind it. It is easy to perceive that the commonplace person is what he is by reason of the culture and conventions which have surrounded him from childhood, But it is difficult to rend the veil that enshrouds these elements and detect how they themselves arose out of the initiatives and interactions of bygone men. Just as anatomy was developed long before embryology, so the presence of deposits of collective thought and action was perceived long before the chemistry by which they were precipitated. Professor Durkheim's case well illus- trates this point. Here is a thinker who realizes vividly the constraint exercised upon the individual by the plexus of social forms about him, yet stands helpless before the task of explain- ing just how these forms came to be.

The study of products to the neglect of processes leads men to impute to an institution a kind of individuality, to imagine that it is endowed with a vitality of its own and endures until this life-force has departed from it. For instance, the origin of the stigma currently attaching to manual labor is attributed to remote servile conditions, and its presence here is ascribed to vis inertia. The true explanation is that this spiritual attitude is natural to the members of a leisure class, and from them it spreads out through society, until, strange to say, it infects the manual laboring class itself. The stigma, far from being a mere