Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/871

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 837

phenomena, and, for a stronger reason, every society, is at once inorganic, organic, and psychic. This is constant and general, whatever its object. All economic phenomena contain some ideal elements; all ideological phenomena imply some inorganic elements. An economic syndicate differs in this respect from an artistic, religious, or scientific group only from the quantitative point of view ; their qualitative composition is the same.

We have seen that the elementary and constitutive factors of all society, territory and population, considered as well in their molecular elements as in their molar aggregation, are always and everywhere limited, both in their structure and in their prop- erties. We can deduce from this that all human society, being only a superior and synthetic combination of these factors and elements and their properties, is equally limited. But it must be remembered that human society is a very complex, superior com- bination, giving rise to some properties of a special and original character, notably the property of self-development and con- tractual organization found nowhere else.

The great law of differentiation remains, nevertheless, the most general law of the structure of societies and of their devel- opment. The first step of all social formation, as' of all organic individualization, is the formation of a contour, a limit, a boun- dary, at once separative, protective, and communicating with the exterior. It is especially this last function of frontiers of which the political theorists have lost sight. They have been, in gen- eral, only jurists ; but now, just as economic science has been emancipated from the tutelage of theology and of natural right, so it endeavors to free itself from these same jurists and politi- cal metaphysicians who for centuries have repeated ad nauseam the same absolute principles, forever contradicted by the facts, the solution of the problem of which they have touched only the surface, without penetrating even the coverings. This solu- tion has always escaped them because of their ignorance of the particular social sciences, and especially of social economy. This ignorance has necessarily affected their individual conception of right and politics, because of the necessary interdependence of all the sciences, the law of which they have misunderstood.