Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/870

 836 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

biology that this bounding zone, far from being an obstacle to social intercourse, is the indispensable condition of it. The evo- lution of its function leads us to conceive it as the same organ produced by the differentiation of these relations. Let us be content with this first information furnished by the principle of all the sciences antecedent to sociology. Let us not be content, however, as the organicist school has been with deducing the theory of social frontiers from that of the limits of organized matter, and even from that of inorganic matter, or from the laws of mechanics, as was done long since by other theorists. Let us study the phenomena of social frontiers in themselves, but never losing sight of the principles furnished upon this subject by antecedent sciences. This is the real point of the sociologi- cal view. This has its foundations in biology, just as biology is based upon the data of antecedent sciences. But it does not follow that the theory of social frontiers can be deduced from biology ; in fact, social phenomena present some special charac- teristics which form the domain of a new and in part distinct science.

Although the general law to which the structure of society conforms is that all organic or living matter has a limit, a form, a structure, this is a most simple, and most general law ; it is the first and necessary differentiation of organic and super-organic equilibrium. We will consider here the social structure only from the point of view of its territorial extension, always with reference to the development of population, and to the compo- sition of the two original factors, territory and population. We will consider it only as a whole, in its most general equilibrium ; in a word, from the point of view of its limiting envelope. From now on, our theory applies not only to large societies, or even states, in the largest sense of the words, but to all society what- ever, large or small, general or particular ; in a word, to every collective group, in which are necessarily included elements that are material, anthropological, and even ideal and moral, judicial and political, whatever may be its object, whether purely eco- nomic or purely ideal. In fact, we have already developed, in our essay upon Historic Materialism, the principle that all social