Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/272

 258 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

simple inorganic sciences, whose prior constitution explains the priority of the mesologic doctrines.

The philosophy of limits and of frontiers ought to be solely the generalization of the special laws of limitation, which the several natural sciences offer. We have attempted to take a point of view equally abstract and concrete, for all the orders of phenomena other than those relative to the human species. It remains for us, therefore, to seek in the special sciences, and lastly in social science itself, the natural laws of distribution applicable to humanity.

Here, however, we shall see that there is nothing absolute in the philosophy of limits and frontiers ; that its laws are always generalizations from relations not absolutely constant, not abso- lutely variable, where neither the self, nor the non-self, neither the body nor the mind, neither the race nor the environment, intervenes to the exclusion of the other. We see that they form, on the contrary, a continual equilibrium ; that they manifest a static state which accompanies, everywhere and at each moment, the structure and the functioning of all societies. The human species, however, is also an environment, which not only equili- brates with the other exterior environments in the formation of particular societies, but which, considered in its universality, carries its environment in itself, or is carried by this environment, from which it can no more be separated than the tortoise from its carapace or the soul from the body. Similarly, each particular society is one with its so-called environment; the latter forms an integral part: it is a whole ; with the difference that the other particular societies are to it relatively exterior, while for human- ity in general, according to the profound vision of Spinoza, all is in all. We shall see, in a word, that in sociology the fusion and and conciliation of the antagonism of the two schools, mesologic and anthropological, has its natural solution in the monism of phenomena and social forces. In sociology, the philosophic solution ought to be analogous to that already brought about in physio-psychology.

G. DE GREEF.

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM.

[To be continued^