Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/725

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY /OI

authoritative point of view when he remarks, very correctly, that the word "order" has a double signification "government" and "arrangement" and that the first serves only as the initiation of the second.

I do not insist upon the conclusion of Comte's social statics, except in order to note the subjective idealism. We shall have occasion to recur to these several static theories relating to the family, language, property, government, etc. He ends his study concerning the positive theory of the general limits of variations pecul- iar to the human order a title so full of promise by proclaim- ing the final and subjective preponderance of the Great Being Humanity over the objective influence, i. e., over the material, affini- tive or feminine and intellectual. "Death, the necessary conse- quence of life, ends by becoming the principal source of its systematization." The subjective influence of death in virtue of its irrevocability ends by surmounting everything, and

nothing better can confirm this precious conclusion than its special applica- tion to the institution of language, which is more social than anything else, and on that account better fitted to embody all of our personal attributes. Under the growing weight of the subjective impulsions the human tongue tends without ceasing toward its complete final systematization in proportion as our solidarity and continuity are developed across the objective variations produced by climates, races, nationalities, or individualities. This necessary unity, at once consequence and condition of religious universality, renders everywhere systematic the effective submission of each to the always sacred preponderance of the Great Being to whom we unconsciously submit the regular ascendency.

Why unconsciously, seeing that Comte is aware of this influ- ence and informs us of it? Indeed, all that is very poetic, but sociology does not have to make a choice between objectivism and subjectivism. Its unitary systematization, fully and exclusively positive, suffices of itself: it embraces the subject and the object, man and his environment, in a single organic whole, which is society. Of Comte's grandiose conception of a Great Being Humanity there remains in reality the fundamental law of soli- darity in space and of continuity in time, of which variability is a constant and necessary element. This law by itself sufficiently explains the connection of all of the spontaneous and successive