Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/430

 416 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

assumes the task of proving the reality of social as distinguished from biological determinism and of setting forth the relations between the two. After passing in review the theories of Spencer, Novicow, Ammon, and others who deny social determinism, and culling from such writers as Huxley, Durkheim, Ward, and others evidences of dis- agreement with them, he presents a theory of his own which attaches social to biological determinism, and asserts the superiority of the former. His theory, in short, is this : Biological determinism is supreme in all vital phenomena, or in all the region of life below the advent of mind. Mind is derived exclusively from the relations which are formed between individuals living in an organized and evolving society. Intellect and consciousness are not products of the physio- logical cell or of relations between cells, but of the relations between individuals as social units. Man, the possessor of mind, loses under the influence of a changing environment the power to transmit physio- logically the qualities acquired under these conditions, and this func- tion is performed by social heredity. The essential characteristic of the social fact is its non-inheritance ; as assimilation and consequent heredity are the quid proprium of the vital. All is social which is not physiologically transmissible. Physiological heredity, being a conse- quence of the rigidity of the cosmic environment, is progressively neutralized on account of the mobility and increasing complexity of the social environment. Instinct, which is a product of physiological heredity, is altered, disorganized, and finally gives way to reason, the product of social heredity, and the agent of social determinism. The opposition of social and biological determinism is paralleled, then, by the opposition of social and biological heredity, and of instinct and reason. Intelligence, consciousness, and reason are the products of the social environment. These, however, are employed to modify the environment, which, in turn, reacts upon the plastic organism. Thus the laws of biology become subject to the laws of mind; natural selec- tion is made to give place to justice, the spontaneous to the conscious, natural inequality to ethico-social equality. True social laws, therefore, lie not behind us imbedded in social history, but in the enlightened reason of men. They are the legal enactments which all reflecting men will voluntarily obey.

Such, in brief, is the theory which M. Draghicesco presents. He is in error in supposing that he is the first to state the problem of of social determinism in such a way as to make it the counterpart of biological determinism, or that his main thesis is new. The central