Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/259

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 245

by the sacred writings of India, China, Persia, by the Bible, the Koran, and the gospels. The second would be distinctly rational, idealistic, or realistic, according as it proclaims that the absolute free will of man has complete power over the object. Almost all of the Greek and Roman historians and philosophers belong to this school. The third phase, finally, would be that of natural conceptions, where the philosophy of history "seeks the natural laws which direct this particular part of nature, known as humanity, into inflexibly prescribed paths in virtue of an eternal necessity." This classification is only partly exact and complete, though in its main lines conformable to the three stages of Comte. It differs in that it does not sufficiently distinguish the several stages of religious forms, the transition forms between religion and metaphysics, the several conceptions of the latter, nor its evolution toward the purely scientific and positive philosophy. The fundamental conception of this latter is even completely neglected, namely, the negation of the absolute, which is the bond and the common fault of the first three phases. It equally loses the view, and seems to deny the possibility, that societies may interfere, within certain limits, with their particular structure and with their particular movements, which would presuppose no "eternal and inflexible" laws, but simply the determinism and the relativity of natural laws in the constitution and activity of societies. The natural laws, indeed, are only abstract and general relations. They do not direct and do not determine humanity as exterior forces. The social forces in their reciprocal relations are other than the properties of the social matter. Some expres- sions used by Gumplowicz are vestiges of a metaphysical and anthropomorphic language. Only the positive laws, which are the works of man, although equally subjected to social deter- minism, practically rule and govern in certain historic move- ments, through physical and moral constraint, the relations of men in civil and political societies. Finally, this classification gives no place to the conception that is really new, and which is my own, according to which, in sociology, the physical and organic environment is made one with humanity, in such manner that every society, from the most simple up to the universal