Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 18.djvu/360

* SOCIOLOGY. 306 SOCIOLOGY. number of important generalizations. In the writings of Aquinas and Dante, of Macliiavelli and VicOj of Bodin, Althusius, Spinoza, Hobbes, l^oc-ke, Hume, and Rousseau, we Iiave acute inter- jjretations of social phenomena in terms of hu- man nature, i.e. of motives. Montesquieu (q.v. ), in L'Esprit des lots, laid the foundations of an interpretation in terms of external conditions or environment, and this interpretation was further developed in a few special directions by the Physiocrats. In none of these writings, however, were scientific methods of investigation strictly followed, and in none of them after Aristotle did there appear the conception of a comprehensive social science. They were penetrating studies of special phases of social phenomena, not ex- planations of society as a whole. The conception of a comprehensive social sci- ence we owe to Auguste C'onite, who invented for it the objectionable name 'sociology.' Comte felt strongly that all social studies until his day had been fragmentary and polemical, and metaphysical rather than scientific. He regarded society as a perfect vniity and protested against the attempt to investigate religious, economic, or political phenomena apart from one another, as necessarily misleading. His chief interest, however, was to include the study of society within a sclienie of positive philosophy, from which all theological conceptions and speculative methods should be eliminated. Beyond these ideas of what the science ought to be Comte's own contribution to sociology amounted to little. The concept of a general sociology' left little impression upon scientific thought imtil Herbert Spencer wrote The Sliidi/ of Socioloriy (1873), and made the 'principles of sociologj'' an in- tegral part of his system of 'synthetic philos- ophy.' Beyond the general idea and the name, Spencer's sociology has nothing in common with Comte's. Spencer's system is an explanation of society in terms of evolution. He regards society as an organism, which inidergocs integration and differentiation. It has a sustaining system analogous to the alimentary system of the ani- mal, a distributing system, analogous to the circulatory system, and a regulating system analogous to the nervous system. This social organism conditions the life of the indi- vidual. In the struggle for existence social groups like individuals come into conflict. Fear, born of conflict, for coimtless ages is a controlling emotion. Dominated by fear and its sister passion vengeance, men precipitate conflicts which are not forced upon them by necessity, and which often assume the pro- portions of war. Cliaracter is molded to mili- tarism. Cruelty and treachery toward enemies is a virtue. Submissive obedience to authority is exacted, and the whole social organization is pervaded by coercion. From the fear of the liv- ing have arisen a ceremonial and a political control, and from the fear of the dead, growing out of the belief that the spirit, surviving the body as a ghost, continues to interfere in the affairs of the living, has arisen a religious con- trol. The ceremonial, political, and religious systems are the regulative mechanism of society. Captives taken in war, or whole populations reduced to serfdom, constitute the sustaining system. Militarism consolidating small groups into petty States, and these into nations, achieves social integration ; but by widening the area within which peace prevails it brings about its own decline. The transition from militarism to industrialism, thus made possible by social in- tegration, transforms human nature and social institutions. These principles Spencer has ap- plied to the interpretation of domestic, cere- monial, ecclesiastical, political, and industrial institutions. His system is a coherent scientific whole, yet it lacks one important feature of a growing science. It does not develop and apply any distinctive metliod of investigation. Such a metliod had already been contributed by Quetelet, the Belgian statistician. In his Sur la thiorie des prohdhililes appliquces aiix sci- ences morales et poliiiqiies (184(')), Du systeme sociale et des lots qui le rcgissciit ( 1848), and Sur la statistique morale et les principes qui doivent rii foriiier la base (1848) he set forth the one method of research by which the study of social phenomena will in time be brought to that exactness which characterizes older sciences. Thus far, however, systematic treatises on so- ciology have been devoted almost wholly to the further exploitation of general concepts, and little progress has been made toward correlating these with statistical method. Sociological sys- tems may be classified as physiographic, biologi- cal, psychological, and ethnographic. The phys- iographic systems attempt to explain all social evolution in terms of the action of environment upon character, conduct, and institutions. Mon- tesquieu's Esprit des lois and Buckle's History of Givilisation in England are the great classica among such works. Many of the so-called eco- nomic interpretations of history also belong in this group, while others fall into a dift'erent class. If by economy we mean the direct relation be- tween organisms and their environment, the sub- sistence of plants, animals, and men upon the bounty of nature, and the whole struggle for ex- istence, then the economic interpretation of his- tory becomes identical with physiographic sociol- ogy. If, however, by economy we mean technical processes and indistrial organization as in the social-economic philosophy of Karl Marx, the economic interpretation of history is an explana- tion of one phase of history by another phase. In strictness we ought to distinguish between an organic economy, meaning thereby the whole scheme of adjustment between organism and en- vironment, and an industrial or business econ- omy, a comparatively late development of human evolution. Social evolution is an incident of or- ganic economy; industrial economy is an inci- dent of social evolution. The writings of Simon N. Patten. The Theory of Hocial Forecs ( Phila- delphia, 1896). The Theory of Prosperity (New- York, 1901), and Heredity and ftoeial Progress (Xcw York, 190.3), are essays in the explanation of society in terms of the organic economy. What may be called the biological-organic conception of society presupposes more or less of the physiographic, but it does not accept the usual account of the influence of environment upon the community as adequate. Granting that social processes are in the last analysis to be accounted for by the relations of organism to environment, including competing organisms, the biologists raise the question of the nature of society itself, and answer that society is a com- pound organism, having its own anatomy and physiology, its pathology also, and assume that