Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/584

 566 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

been the result of human and social variability. The universal society can be realized only by means of the mass of small societies, of intercalary groups; and it is to be presumed that these more or less limited organizations, far from destroying each other, serve only to increase with the progress of differentiation and adaptation. But these multiplications and several social varieties will necessitate more and more an extended and powerful co-ordi- nation. The tendency to variation implies a tendency to this co-ordination. The variation, therefore, no longer seems to us as an obstacle to the formation of the universal society, but as the very condition of its existence.

In whatever way the races may have been at first formed, the conditions of their subsequent evolution, as also those of their differentiation and crossing, and consequently, of their unifica- tion, would have remained the same. A knowledge of these constant and necessary static laws suffices for sociology, which is not directly interested in the rest of the controversy. The questions of relations preponderate for it over the problems of origin.

If man is scattered over the surface of the globe to a greater extent, from the point of view of the space in which he displays his activity, than any other animal species, he owes it precisely to his power of adaptation through differentiation into races, sub-races, and more and more special varieties, and further through his sociological differentiations, properly speaking, which are superior forms of variability in the human species, and appropriate and complementary instruments of his unifica- tion. This adaptation, comprehending social adaptation, is accomplished through natural and artificial selection, whose organic and superorganic results are crystallized and transmitted by heredity. Thus the social forms are susceptible of the greatest extension from the standpoint of mass and territory, as well as of the greatest intensification from the standpoint of the complexity, depth, and strength of the bonds which unite mankind.

G. DE GREEF. BRUSSELS, BELGIUM.

\To be continued^