Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/401

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 387

reality only a play upon words one of the able and profound mystifications in which the metaphysicians were for centuries past masters. It was not through a generalization from obser- vation, but through a simple phrase, that was resolved, in a simply formulated synthesis, the problem of monogenism and poly- genism, connected with that of the race and the environment, as well as with that of language. The conciliatory synthesis was so little real that in Geiger's theory of language, for example, the organism and the environment ended by being lost to view, and the connection between the sound and the idea was considered as entirely artificial, arbitrary, and conventional.

I have already indicated that positive sociology is not directly interested in the solution of the controversy between monogenism and polygenism. Questions of absolute origin are outside of its proper domain. In the problem which occupies us they are important only from the point of view of the historic evolution of the theories themselves, and in so far as the actual limitations of these last go to show us in an evident manner that the race and the environment, the self and the non-self, reduce themselves in sociology, and in pure philosophy in general, to the relations, connections, and laws whose formula, precisely so far as it is evolved from the latest scientific data relative to the distribution of the human species, has nothing of the absolute. It is there- fore only from this historic point of view that we recall the two great scientific schools which arise, the one from monogenism and the other from polygenism.

Both, in fact, admit the specific unity of humanity. The common and essential characteristics of structure and of life make from the several human varieties a homogeneous and single specific type.

Charles Darwin, and especially Haeckel, are monogenists. According to them, the races are derived variations; they are secondary. According to Pritchard and Topinard, we compre- hend under the name of races all collections of individuals presenting more or less common characteristics which are trans- missible through heredity, the origin of the characteristics being put aside and reserved. The race is a sub-product of the species.