Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/714

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY. VIII.

PART III.' GENERAL STRUCTURE OF SOCIETIES.

CHAPTER VII. THE SOCIAL FRONTIERS.

SECTION I. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS.

THIS problem is one of the most important of concrete and abstract social statics. The majority of present sociologists seem not even to have dreamed of it, and yet it obtrudes itself as much as dynamics. Quetelet and Comte deserve the credit for having outlined it. Though with the former the static point of view remains too exclusively dominant, he realized in every case that the theory of social statics ought to rest upon the most careful observation of social phenomena. Comte, in his grand generalizations, had the misfortune of not confining him- self to this rigorous observation imposed by every positive science.

It is in chap, viii of his Systtme de politique positive, in the second volume devoted entirely to social statics, that Comte formulates his positive theory of the general limits of variation peculiar to the human race. After having stated that, with the exception of astronomy, the variations are at once natural and artificial, he proclaims from the first that it is thus with the human order, collective and individual, which is the most modi- fiable of all precisely because it is the most complex. It is one of the greatest services rendered by Comte to social science to have put in evidence this proposition destined to revolutionize the ancient philosophy, or rather the social metaphysics, accord- ing to which the natural order of societies was recognized as immutable. The whole human wisdom formerly consisted in freeing, in disengaging, the natural order from the obstacles which had been imposed by the civil institutions. But if the social order is more modifiable than any other, either spontane- ously or even by the intervention of individuals and societies, does it follow that these variations may be illimitable ? Comte

690