Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/363



his Study of Sociology Mr. Spencer shows that, just as the form of a pile of bricks or cannon balls is conditioned by the form of the bricks or balls themselves, and the form of crystallization is characteristic for each kind of molecule, so the properties of a social aggregate are derived from and determined by the properties of its members. We should therefore expect that, other things being equal, the diversity of any two societies would correspond to the diversity in character of the peoples composing them.

In his Principles of Sociology Mr. Spencer is more cautious. After stating that the primary factors in social phenomena are the characters of the units and the nature of the physical environment (for all minor groupings within a population this factor, being common to all, may be ignored), he goes on to enumerate certain derived factors, one of these being the reciprocal influence of the society and its units:

The principle that seemed so self-evident to Mr. Spencer has not passed without challenge. De Greef protests against the proposition that the character of an aggregate is determined by the essential characters of its constituent units, on the ground that it gives up the existence of a distinct social science. Says he:

If the social aggregates are only the larger and more complex image of the units that compose them, if social science is concerned only with the morphological or functional relations between the series of units and the