Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/544

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY. V. THE SOCIAL FORCES.

IF the sociological harvest has so far proved scanty, it is not because the soil is poor, but because it is so rich that the tares choke the wheat. It is long since the first clearing was made in the jungle, yet the rank growth of errors and fallacies never ceases. No sooner is a false hypothesis or a misleading analogy cut down than a fresh one springs up in its place. From the soil seems to rise a miasma that makes the tillers giddy. Many of those who thrust in the spade may ere long be seen sedulously watering and tending some grotesque speculative growth which cumbers the ground, and which will have to be uprooted if there is to be a crop. Such is the picture that presents itself when one notes the reigning uncertainty and confusion in respect to the causes of social phenomena.

In his First Principles Spencer adopts a mechanical interpreta- tion of society, and dwells on those aspects of social life which seem to illustrate the principles of his evolutionary philosophy, I have elsewhere 1 shown that he established analogies, but not identities of principle, and that the social laws he set up by the simple process of extending cosmic laws over social facts are in many cases untrue.

In his later work Spencer renounces his early indiscretions, and they might well be left unnoticed had not Professor Giddings given them a new lease of life. He conceives that social facts admit of a double interpretation, the objective and the subjec- tive. Things happen in society, no doubt, because of men's desires, but also because a part of cosmic energy is converted into organic and social energies. "Social evolution is but a phase of cosmic evolution." In the expansion of states, the movement of population toward opportunities, the concentration of men in cities, the course of exchanges, the lines of legislative policy, and the direction of religious, scientific, and educational

In the second paper of this series.

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