Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/818

 788 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

question of cause turning simply on whether the plasm awaits the ferment or the ferment awaits its plasm.

All parts of an organism are to a certain extent related to one another, so that when one part varies the other part varies simul- taneously. If, for example, a creature's head becomes heavier, the muscles of its neck must become larger. If a young animal is castrated, the secondary sexual characters fail to appear. On this same principle of correlation an important change in any sphere of social life is apt to produce sympathetic or compensa- tory changes in other spheres. For instance, few of the muta- tions in social ethics are due to novel ethical ideas ; they are echoes or aftermath of changes in some of the more basic spheres, such as economic, sex, or religious life. Now, in social dynamics one cannot content himself with accounting for one social change by another social change, but must follow up the causal chain link by link until he reaches either a regular social process or an extra-social factor.

He must, moreover, hold firmly in mind the distinction between the cause of a social phenomenon and the cause of a change in this phenomenon. The former is, as was shown in my last paper, human desire. Desire is the steam which drives the machinery. It is behind all social activities, beneath all group- ings and relationships. Its action is essentially statical. If it produces change, that change is incidental. The causes of social transformation are to be sought, not in desires, but in something of a different nature which changes their direction or modifies the framework within which they operate. The causes are the innovating example, the foreign influence, or the new knowledge, which engenders new wants. They are the increase of popula- tion, the accumulation of capital, the removal to a new country, or the impact of a neighboring group, by which are altered the conditions under which old wants can be gratified. This broad contrast between the social forces and the factors of social change is another justification for dividing sociology into statics and dynamics.

If we are to explain the differences in the rate or course of change between societies or between different periods in the his-