I. Introduction
1. Popular Conceptions of Progress 953
2. The Problem of Progress 956
3. History of the Concept of Progress 958
4. Classification of the Materials 962
II. Materials
A. The Concept of Progress
1. The Earliest Conception of Progress. _F. S. Marvin_ 965
2. Progress and Organization. _Herbert Spencer_ 966
3. The Stages of Progress. _Auguste Comte_ 968
4. Progress and the Historical Process. _Leonard T. Hobhouse_ 969
B. Progress and Science
1. Progress and Happiness. _Lester F. Ward_ 973
2. Progress and Prevision. _John Dewey_ 975
3. Progress and the Limits of Scientific Prevision.
_Arthur J. Balfour_ 977
4. Eugenics as a Science of Progress. _Francis Galton_ 979
C. Progress and Human Nature
1. The Nature of Man. _George Santayana_ 983
2. Progress and the Mores. _W. G. Sumner_ 983
3. War and Progress. _James Bryce_ 984
4. Progress and the Cosmic Urge
a) The _Élan Vitale. Henri Bergson_ 989
b) The _Dunkler Drang. Arthur Schopenhauer_ 994
III. Investigations and Problems
1. Progress and Social Research 1000
2. Indices of Progress 1002
_Selected Bibliography_ 1004
_Topics for Written Themes_ 1010
_Questions for Discussion_ 1010
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See _Source Book for Social Origins_. Ethnological materials,
psychological standpoint, classified and annotated bibliographies for
the interpretation of savage society (Chicago, 1909).
CHAPTER I
SOCIOLOGY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES[2]
I. SOCIOLOGY AND "SCIENTIFIC" HISTORY
Sociology first gained recognition as an independent science with the
publication, between 1830 and 1842, of Auguste Comte's _Cours de
philosophie positive_. Comte did not, to be sure, create sociology. He
did give it a name, a program, and a place among the sciences.
Comte's program for the new science proposed an extension to politics
and to history of the positive methods of the natural sciences. Its
practical aim was to establish government on the secure foundation of an
exact science and give to the predictions of history something of the
precision of mathematical formulae.
We have to contemplate social phenomena as susceptible of
prevision, like all other classes, within the limits of
exactness compatible with their higher complexity.
Comprehending the three characteristics of political science
which we have been examining, prevision of social phenomena
supposes, first, that we have abandoned the region of
metaphysical idealities, to assume the ground of observed
realities by a systematic subordination of imagination to
observation; secondly, that political conceptions have ceased
to be absolute, and have become relative to the variable state
of civilization, so that theories, following the natural course
of facts, may admit of our foreseeing them; and, thirdly, that
permanent political action is limited by determinate laws,
since, if social events were always exposed to disturbance by
the accidental intervention of the legislator, human or divine,
no scientific prevision of them would be possible. Thus, we may
concentrate the conditions of the spirit of positive social
philosophy on this one great attribute of scientific
prevision.[3]
Comte proposed, in short, to make government a technical science and
politics a profession. He looked forward to a time when legislation,
based on a scientific study of human nature, would assume the character
of natural law. The earlier and more elementary sciences, particularly
physics and chemistry, had given man control over external nature; the
last science, sociology, was to give man control over himself.
Men were long in learning that Man's power of modifying
phenomena can result only from his knowledge of their natural
laws; and in the infancy of each science, they believed
themselves able to exert an unbounded influence over the
phenomena of that science.... Social phenomena are, of course,
from their extreme complexity, the last to be freed from this
pretension: but it is therefore only the more necessary to
remember that the pretension existed with regard to all the
rest, in their earliest stage, and to anticipate therefore that
social science will, in its turn, be emancipated from the
delusion.... It [the existing social science] represents the
social action of Man to be indefinite and arbitrary, as was
once thought in regard to biological, chemical, physical, and
even astronomical phenomena, in the earlier stages of their
respective sciences.... The human race finds itself delivered
over, without logical protection, to the ill-regulated
experimentation of the various political schools, each one of
which strives to set up, for all future time, its own immutable
type of government. We have seen what are the chaotic results
of such a strife; and we shall find that there is no chance of
order and agreement but in subjecting social phenomena, like
all others, to invariable natural laws, which shall, as a
whole, prescribe for each period, with entire certainty, the
limits and character of political action: in other words,
introducing into the study of social phenomena the same
positive spirit which has regenerated every other branch of
human speculation.[4]
In the present anarchy of political opinion and parties, changes in the
existing social order inevitably assume, he urged, the character, at the
best, of a mere groping empiricism; at the worst, of a social convulsion
like that of the French Revolution. Under the direction of a positive,
in place of a speculative or, as Comte would have said, metaphysical
science of society, progress must assume the character of an orderly
march.
It was to be expected, with the extension of exact methods of
investigation to other fields of knowledge, that the study of man and of
society would become, or seek to become, scientific in the sense in
which that word is used in the natural sciences. It is interesting, in
this connection, that Comte's first name for sociology was _social
physics_. It was not until he had reached the fourth volume of his
_Positive Philosophy_ that the word sociological is used for the first
time.
Comte, if he was foremost, was not first in the search for a positive
science of society, which would give man that control over men that he
had over external nature. Montesquieu, in his _The Spirit of Laws_,
first published in 1747, had distinguished in the organization of
society, between form, "the particular structure," and the forces, "the
human passions which set it in motion." In his preface to this first
epoch-making essay in what Freeman calls "comparative politics,"
Montesquieu suggests that the uniformities, which he discovered beneath
the wide variety of positive law, were contributions not merely to a
science of law, but to a science of mankind.
I have first of all considered mankind; and the result of my
thoughts has been, that amidst such an infinite diversity of
laws and manners, they are not solely conducted by the caprice
of fancy.[5]
Hume, likewise, put politics among the natural sciences.[6] Condorcet
wanted to make history positive.[7] But there were, in the period
between 1815 and 1840 in France, conditions which made the need of a new
science of politics peculiarly urgent. The Revolution had failed and the
political philosophy, which had directed and justified it, was bankrupt.
France, between 1789 and 1815, had adopted, tried, and rejected no less
than ten different constitutions. But during this period, as Saint-Simon
noted, society, and the human beings who compose society, had not
changed. It was evident that government was not, in any such sense as
the philosophers had assumed, a mere artefact and legislative
construction. Civilization, as Saint-Simon conceived it, was a part of
nature. Social change was part of the whole cosmic process. He proposed,
therefore, to make politics a science as positive as physics. The
subject-matter of political science, as he conceived it, was not so
much political forms as social conditions. History had been literature.
It was destined to become a science.[8]
Comte called himself Saint-Simon's pupil. It is perhaps more correct to
say Saint-Simon formulated the problem for which Comte, in his _Positive
Philosophy_, sought a solution. It was Comte's notion that with the
arrival of sociology the distinction which had so long existed, and
still exists, between philosophy, in which men define their wishes, and
natural science, in which they describe the existing order of nature,
would disappear. In that case ideals would be defined in terms of
reality, and the tragic difference between what men want and what is
possible would be effaced. Comte's error was to mistake a theory of
progress for progress itself. It is certainly true that as men learn
what is, they will adjust their ideals to what is possible. But
knowledge grows slowly.
Man's knowledge of mankind has increased greatly since 1842. Sociology,
"the positive science of humanity," has moved steadily forward in the
direction that Comte's program indicated, but it has not yet replaced
history. Historians are still looking for methods of investigation which
will make history "scientific."
No one who has watched the course of history during the last
generation can have felt doubt of its tendency. Those of us who
read Buckle's first volume when it appeared in 1857, and almost
immediately afterwards, in 1859, read the _Origin of Species_
and felt the violent impulse which Darwin gave to the study of
natural laws, never doubted that historians would follow until
they had exhausted every possible hypothesis to create a
science of history. Year after year passed, and little progress
has been made. Perhaps the mass of students are more skeptical
now than they were thirty years ago of the possibility that
such a science can be created. Yet almost every successful
historian has been busy with it, adding here a new analysis, a
new generalization there; a clear and definite connection where
before the rupture of idea was absolute; and, above all,
extending the field of study until it shall include all races,
all countries, and all times. Like other branches of science,
history is now encumbered and hampered by its own mass, but its
tendency is always the same, and cannot be other than what it
is. That the effort to make history a science may fail is
possible, and perhaps probable; but that it should cease,
unless for reasons that would cause all science to cease, is
not within the range of experience. Historians will not, and
even if they would they can not, abandon the attempt. Science
itself would admit its own failure if it admitted that man, the
most important of all its subjects, could not be brought within
its range.[9]
Since Comte gave the new science of humanity a name and a point of view,
the area of historical investigation has vastly widened and a number of
new social sciences have come into existence--ethnology, archaeology,
folklore, the comparative studies of cultural materials, i.e., language,
mythology, religion, and law, and in connection with and closely related
with these, folk-psychology, social psychology, and the psychology of
crowds, which latter is, perhaps, the forerunner of a wider and more
elaborate political psychology. The historians have been very much
concerned with these new bodies of materials and with the new points of
view which they have introduced into the study of man and of society.
Under the influences of these sciences, history itself, as James Harvey
Robinson has pointed out, has had a history. But with the innovations
which the new history has introduced or attempted to introduce, it does
not appear that there have been any fundamental changes in method or
ideology in the science itself.
Fifty years have elapsed since Buckle's book appeared, and I
know of no historian who would venture to maintain that we had
made any considerable advance toward the goal he set for
himself. A systematic prosecution of the various branches of
social science, especially political economy, sociology,
anthropology, and psychology, is succeeding in explaining many
things; but history must always remain, from the standpoint of
the astronomer, physicist, or chemist, a highly inexact and
fragmentary body of knowledge.... History can no doubt be
pursued in a strictly scientific spirit, but the data we
possess in regard to the past of mankind are not of a nature to
lend themselves to organization into an exact science,
although, as we shall see, they may yield truths of vital
importance.[10]
History has not become, as Comte believed it must, an exact science, and
sociology has not taken its place in the social sciences. It is
important, however, for understanding the mutations which have taken
place in sociology since Comte to remember that it had its origin in an
effort to make history exact. This, with, to be sure, considerable
modifications, is still, as we shall see, an ambition of the science.
II. HISTORICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL FACTS
Sociology, as Comte conceived it, was not, as it has been characterized,
"a highly important point of view," but a fundamental science, i.e., a
method of investigation and "a body of discoveries about mankind."[11]
In the hierarchy of the sciences, sociology, the last in time, was first
in importance. The order was as follows: mathematics, astronomy,
physics, chemistry, biology including psychology, sociology. This order
represented a progression from the more elementary to the more complex.
It was because history and politics were concerned with the most complex
of natural phenomena that they were the last to achieve what Comte
called the positive character. They did this in sociology.
Many attempts have been made before and since Comte to find a
satisfactory classification of the sciences. The order and relation of
the sciences is still, in fact, one of the cardinal problems of
philosophy. In recent years the notion has gained recognition that the
difference between history and the natural sciences is not one of
degree, but of kind; not of subject-matter merely, but of method. This
difference in method is, however, fundamental. It is a difference not
merely in the interpretation but in the _logical character_ of facts.
Every historical fact, it is pointed out, is concerned with a unique
event. History never repeats itself. If nothing else, the mere
circumstance that every event has a _date_ and _location_ would give
historical facts an individuality that facts of the abstract sciences do
not possess. Because historical facts always are located and dated, and
cannot therefore be repeated, they are not subject to experiment and
verification. On the other hand, a fact not subject to verification is
not a fact for natural science. History, as distinguished from natural
history, deals with individuals, i.e., individual events, persons,
institutions. Natural science is concerned, not with individuals, but
with classes, types, species. All the assertions that are valid for
natural science concern classes. An illustration will make this
distinction clear.
Sometime in October, 1838, Charles Darwin happened to pick up and read
Malthus' book on _Population_. The facts of "the struggle for
existence," so strikingly presented in that now celebrated volume,
suggested an explanation of a problem which had long interested and
puzzled him, namely, the origin of species.
This is a statement of a historical fact, and the point is that it is
not subject to empirical verification. It cannot be stated, in other
words, in the form of a hypothesis, which further observation of other
men of the same type will either verify or discredit.
On the other hand, in his _Descent of Man_, Darwin, discussing the rôle
of sexual selection in evolution of the species, makes this observation:
"Naturalists are much divided with respect to the object of the singing
of birds. Few more careful observers ever lived than Montagu, and he
maintained that the 'males of songbirds and of many others do not in
general search for the female, but, on the contrary, their business in
spring is to perch on some conspicuous spot, breathing out their full
and amorous notes, which, by instinct, the female knows and repairs to
the spot to choose her mate.'"
This is a typical statement of a fact of natural history. It is not,
however, the rather vague generality of the statement that makes it
scientific. It is its representative character, the character which
makes it possible of verification by further observation which makes it
a scientific fact.
It is from facts of this kind, collected, compared, and classified,
irrespective of time or place, that the more general conclusions are
drawn, upon which Darwin based his theory of the "descent of man." This
theory, as Darwin conceived it, was not an _interpretation_ of the facts
but an _explanation_.
The relation between history and sociology, as well as the manner in
which the more abstract social sciences have risen out of the more
concrete, may be illustrated by a comparison between history and
geography. Geography as a science is concerned with the visible world,
the earth, its location in space, the distribution of the land masses,
and of the plants, animals, and peoples upon its surface. The order, at
least the fundamental order, which it seeks and finds among the objects
it investigates is _spatial_. As soon as the geographer begins to
compare and classify the plants, the animals, and the peoples with
which he comes in contact, geography passes over into the special
sciences, i.e., botany, zoölogy, and anthropology.
History, on the other hand, is concerned with a world of events. Not
everything that happened, to be sure, is history, but every event that
ever was or ever will be significant is history.
Geography attempts to reproduce for us the visible world as it exists in
space; history, on the contrary, seeks to re-create for us in the
present the significance of the past. As soon as historians seek to take
events out of their historical setting, that is to say, out of their
time and space relations, in order to compare them and classify them; as
soon as historians begin to emphasize the typical and representative
rather than the unique character of events, history ceases to be history
and becomes sociology.
The differences here indicated between history and sociology are based
upon a more fundamental distinction between the historical and the
natural sciences first clearly defined by Windelband, the historian of
philosophy, in an address to the faculty of the University of Strassburg
in 1894.
The distinction between natural science and history begins at
the point where we seek to convert facts into knowledge. Here
again we observe that the one (natural science) seeks to
formulate laws, the other (history) to portray events. In the
one case thought proceeds from the description of particulars
to the general relations. In the other case it clings to a
genial depiction of the individual object or event. For the
natural scientist the object of investigation which cannot be
repeated never has, as such, scientific value. It serves his
purpose only so far as it may be regarded as a type or as a
special instance of a class from which the type may be deduced.
The natural scientist considers the single case only so far as
he can see in it the features which serve to throw light upon a
general law. For the historian the problem is to revive and
call up into the present, in all its particularity, an event in
the past. His aim is to do for an actual event precisely what
the artist seeks to do for the object of his imagination. It is
just here that we discern the kinship between history and art,
between the historian and the writer of literature. It is for
this reason that natural science emphasized the abstract; the
historian, on the other hand, is interested mainly in the
concrete.
The fact that natural science emphasizes the abstract and
history the concrete will become clearer if we compare the
results of the researches of the two sciences. However finespun
the conceptions may be which the historical critic uses in
working over his materials, the final goal of such study is
always to create out of the mass of events a vivid portrait of
the past. And what history offers us is pictures of men and of
human life, with all the wealth of their individuality,
reproduced in all their characteristic vivacity. Thus do the
peoples and languages of the past, their forms and beliefs,
their struggles for power and freedom, speak to us through the
mouth of history.
How different it is with the world which the natural sciences
have created for us! However concrete the materials with which
they started, the goal of these sciences is theories,
eventually mathematical formulations of laws of change.
Treating the individual, sensuous, changing objects as mere
unsubstantial appearances (phenomena), scientific investigation
becomes a search for the universal laws which rule the timeless
changes of events. Out of this colorful world of the senses,
science creates a system of abstract concepts, in which the
true nature of things is conceived to exist--a world of
colorless and soundless atoms, despoiled of all their earthly
sensuous qualities. Such is the triumph of thought over
perception. Indifferent to change, science casts her anchor in
the eternal and unchangeable. Not the change as such but the
unchanging form of change is what she seeks.
This raises the question: What is the more valuable for the
purposes of knowledge in general, a knowledge of law or a
knowledge of events? As far as that is concerned, both
scientific procedures may be equally justified. The knowledge
of the universal laws has everywhere a practical value in so
far as they make possible man's purposeful intervention in the
natural processes. That is quite as true of the movements of
the inner as of the outer world. In the latter case knowledge
of nature's laws has made it possible to create those tools
through which the control of mankind over external nature is
steadily being extended.
Not less for the purposes of the common life are we dependent
upon the results of historical knowledge. Man is, to change the
ancient form of the expression, the animal who has a history.
His cultural life rests on the transmission from generation to
generation of a constantly increasing body of historical
memories. Whoever proposes to take an active part in this
cultural process must have an understanding of history.
Wherever the thread is once broken--as history itself
proves--it must be painfully gathered up and knitted again into
the historical fabric.
It is, to be sure, true that it is an economy for human
understanding to be able to reduce to a formula or a general
concept the common characteristics of individuals. But the more
man seeks to reduce facts to concepts and laws, the more he is
obliged to sacrifice and neglect the individual. Men have, to
be sure, sought, in characteristic modern fashion, "to make of
history a natural science." This was the case with the
so-called philosophy of history of positivism. What has been
the net result of the laws of history which it has given us? A
few trivial generalities which justify themselves only by the
most careful consideration of their numerous exceptions.
On the other hand it is certain that all interest and values of
life are concerned with what is unique in men and events.
Consider how quickly our appreciation is deadened as some
object is multiplied or is regarded as one case in a thousand.
"She is not the first" is one of the cruel passages in _Faust_.
It is in the individuality and the uniqueness of an object that
all our sense of value has its roots. It is upon this fact that
Spinoza's doctrine of the conquest of the passions by knowledge
rests, since for him knowledge is the submergence of the
individual in the universal, the "once for all" into the
eternal.
The fact that all our livelier appreciations rest upon the
unique character of the object is illustrated above all in our
relations to persons. Is it not an unendurable thought, that a
loved object, an adored person, should have existed at some
other time in just the form in which it now exists for us? Is
it not horrible and unthinkable that one of us, with just this
same individuality should actually have existed in a second
edition?
What is true of the individual man is quite as true of the
whole historical process: it has value only when it is unique.
This is the principle which the Christian doctrine successfully
maintained, as over against Hellenism in the Patristic
philosophy. The middle point of their conception of the world
was the fall and the salvation of mankind as a unique event.
That was the first and great perception of the inalienable
metaphysical right of the historian to preserve for the memory
of mankind, in all their uniqueness and individuality, the
actual events of life.[12]
Like every other species of animal, man has a natural history.
Anthropology is the science of man considered as one of the animal
species, _Homo sapiens_. History and sociology, on the other hand, are
concerned with man as a person, as a "political animal," participating
with his fellows in a common fund of social traditions and cultural
ideals. Freeman, the English historian, said that history was "past
politics" and politics "present history." Freeman uses the word
politics in the large and liberal sense in which it was first used by
Aristotle. In that broad sense of the word, the political process, by
which men are controlled and states governed, and the cultural process,
by which man has been domesticated and human nature formed, are not, as
we ordinarily assume, different, but identical, procedures.
All this suggests the intimate relations which exist between history,
politics, and sociology. The important thing, however, is not the
identities but the distinctions. For, however much the various
disciplines may, in practice, overlap, it is necessary for the sake of
clear thinking to have their limits defined. As far as sociology and
history are concerned the differences may be summed up in a word. Both
history and sociology are concerned with the life of man as man.
History, however, seeks to reproduce and interpret concrete events as
they actually occurred in time and space. Sociology, on the other hand,
seeks to arrive at natural laws and generalizations in regard to human
nature and society, irrespective of time and of place.
In other words, history seeks to find out what actually happened and how
it all came about. Sociology, on the other hand, seeks to explain, on
the basis of a study of other instances, the nature of the process
involved.
By nature we mean just that aspect and character of things in regard to
which it is possible to make general statements and formulate laws. If
we say, in explanation of the peculiar behavior of some individual, that
it is natural or that it is after all "simply human nature," we are
simply saying that this behavior is what we have learned to expect of
this individual or of human beings in general. It is, in other words, a
law.
Natural law, as the term is used here, is any statement which describes
the behavior of a class of objects or the character of a class of acts.
For example, the classic illustration of the so-called "universal
proposition" familiar to students of formal logic, "all men are mortal,"
is an assertion in regard to a class of objects we call men. This is, of
course, simply a more formal way of saying that "men die." Such general
statements and "laws" get meaning only when they are applied to
particular cases, or, to speak again in the terms of formal logic, when
they find a place in a syllogism, thus: "Men are mortal. This is a
man." But such syllogisms may always be stated in the form of a
hypothesis. If this is a man, he is mortal. If a is b, a is also
c. This statement, "Human nature is a product of social contact," is a
general assertion familiar to students of sociology. This law or, more
correctly, hypothesis, applied to an individual case explains the
so-called feral man. Wild men, in the proper sense of the word, are not
the so-called savages, but the men who have never been domesticated, of
which an individual example is now and then discovered.
To state a law in the form of a hypothesis serves to emphasize the fact
that laws--what we have called natural laws at any rate--are subject to
verification and restatement. Under the circumstances the exceptional
instance, which compels a restatement of the hypothesis, is more
important for the purposes of science than other instances which merely
confirm it.
Any science which operates with hypotheses and seeks to state facts in
such a way that they can be compared and verified by further observation
and experiment is, so far as method is concerned, a natural science.
III. HUMAN NATURE AND LAW
One thing that makes the conception of natural history and natural law
important to the student of sociology is that in the field of the social
sciences the distinction between natural and moral law has from the
first been confused. Comte and the social philosophers in France after
the Revolution set out with the deliberate purpose of superseding
legislative enactments by laws of human nature, laws which were to be
positive and "scientific." As a matter of fact, sociology, in becoming
positive, so far from effacing, has rather emphasized the distinctions
that Comte sought to abolish. Natural law may be distinguished from all
other forms of law by the fact that it aims at nothing more than a
description of the behavior of certain types or classes of objects. A
description of the way in which a class, i.e., men, plants, animals, or
physical objects, may be expected under ordinary circumstances to
behave, tells us what we may in a general way expect of any individual
member of that class. If natural science seeks to predict, it is able to
do so simply because it operates with concepts or class names instead,
as is the case with history, with concrete facts and, to use a logical
phrase, "existential propositions."
That the chief end of science is descriptive formulation has
probably been clear to keen analytic minds since the time of
Galileo, especially to the great discoverers in astronomy,
mechanics, and dynamics. But as a definitely stated conception,
corrective of misunderstandings, the view of science as
essentially descriptive began to make itself felt about the
beginning of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and
may be associated with the names of Kirchhoff and Mach. It was
in 1876 that Kirchhoff defined the task of mechanics as that of
"describing completely and in the simplest manner the motions
which take place in nature." Widening this a little, we may say
that the aim of science is to describe natural phenomena and
occurrences as exactly as possible, as simply as possible, as
completely as possible, as consistently as possible, and always
in terms which are communicable and verifiable. This is a very
different rôle from that of solving the riddles of the
universe, and it is well expressed in what Newton said in
regard to the law of gravitation: "So far I have accounted for
the phenomena presented to us by the heavens and the sea by
means of the force of gravity, but I have as yet assigned no
cause to this gravity.... I have not been able to deduce from
phenomena the _raison d'être_ of the properties of gravity and
I have not set up hypotheses." (Newton, _Philosophiae naturalis
principia Mathematica_, 1687.)
"We must confess," said Prof. J. H. Poynting (1900, p. 616),
"that physical laws have greatly fallen off in dignity. No long
time ago they were quite commonly described as the Fixed Laws
of Nature, and were supposed sufficient in themselves to govern
the universe. Now we can only assign to them the humble rank of
mere descriptions, often erroneous, of similarities which we
believe we have observed.... A law of nature explains nothing,
it has no governing power, it is but a descriptive formula
which the careless have sometimes personified." It used to be
said that "the laws of Nature are the thoughts of God"; now we
say that they are the investigator's formulae summing up
regularities of recurrence.[13]
If natural law aims at prediction it tells us what we can do. Moral
laws, on the other hand, tell us, not what we can, but what we ought to
do. The civil or municipal law, finally, tells us not what we can, nor
what we ought, but what we must do. It is very evident that these three
types of law may be very intimately related. We do not know what we
ought to do until we know what we can do; and we certainly should
consider what men can do before we pass laws prescribing what they must
do. There is, moreover, no likelihood that these distinctions will ever
be completely abolished. As long as the words "can," "ought," and "must"
continue to have any meaning for us the distinctions that they represent
will persist in science as well as in common sense.
The immense prestige which the methods of the natural sciences have
gained, particularly in their application to the phenomena of the
physical universe, has undoubtedly led scientific men to overestimate
the importance of mere conceptual and abstract knowledge. It has led
them to assume that history also must eventually become "scientific" in
the sense of the natural sciences. In the meantime the vast collections
of historical facts which the industry of historical students has
accumulated are regarded, sometimes even by historians themselves, as a
sort of raw material, the value of which can only be realized after it
has been worked over into some sort of historical generalization which
has the general character of scientific and ultimately, mathematical
formula.
"History," says Karl Pearson, "can never become science, can never be
anything but a catalogue of facts rehearsed in a more or less pleasing
language until these facts are seen to fall into sequences which can be
briefly resumed in scientific formulae."[14] And Henry Adams, in a
letter to the American Historical Association already referred to,
confesses that history has thus far been a fruitless quest for "the
secret which would transform these odds and ends of philosophy into one
self-evident, harmonious, and complete system."
You may be sure that four out of five serious students of
history who are living today have, in the course of their work,
felt that they stood on the brink of a great generalization
that would reduce all history under a law as clear as the laws
which govern the material world. As the great writers of our
time have touched one by one the separate fragments of admitted
law by which society betrays its character as a subject for
science, not one of them can have failed to feel an instant's
hope that he might find the secret which would transform these
odds and ends of philosophy into one self-evident, harmonious,
and complete system. He has seemed to have it, as the Spanish
say, in his inkstand. Scores of times he must have dropped his
pen to think how one short step, one sudden inspiration, would
show all human knowledge; how, in these thickset forests of
history, one corner turned, one faint trail struck, would
bring him on the highroad of science. Every professor who has
tried to teach the doubtful facts which we now call history
must have felt that sooner or later he or another would put
order in the chaos and bring light into darkness. Not so much
genius or favor was needed as patience and good luck. The law
was certainly there, and as certainly was in places actually
visible, to be touched and handled, as though it were a law of
chemistry or physics. No teacher with a spark of imagination or
with an idea of scientific method can have helped dreaming of
the immortality that would be achieved by the man who should
successfully apply Darwin's method to the facts of human
history.[15]
The truth is, however, that the concrete facts, in which history and
geography have sought to preserve the visible, tangible, and, generally
speaking, the experiential aspects of human life and the visible
universe, have a value irrespective of any generalization or ideal
constructions which may be inferred from or built up out of them. Just
as none of the investigations or generalizations of individual
psychology are ever likely to take the place of biography and
autobiography, so none of the conceptions of an abstract sociology, no
scientific descriptions of the social and cultural processes, and no
laws of progress are likely, in the near future at any rate, to
supersede the more concrete facts of history in which are preserved
those records of those unique and never fully comprehended aspects of
life which we call _events_.
It has been the dream of philosophers that theoretical and abstract
science could and some day perhaps would succeed in putting into
formulae and into general terms all that was significant in the concrete
facts of life. It has been the tragic mistake of the so-called
intellectuals, who have gained their knowledge from textbooks rather
than from observation and research, to assume that science had already
realized its dream. But there is no indication that science has begun to
exhaust the sources or significance of concrete experience. The infinite
variety of external nature and the inexhaustible wealth of personal
experience have thus far defied, and no doubt will continue to defy, the
industry of scientific classification, while, on the other hand, the
discoveries of science are constantly making accessible to us new and
larger areas of experience.
What has been said simply serves to emphasize the instrumental character
of the abstract sciences. History and geography, all of the concrete
sciences, can and do measurably enlarge our experience of life. Their
very purpose is to arouse new interests and create new sympathies; to
give mankind, in short, an environment so vast and varied as will call
out and activate all his instincts and capacities.
The more abstract sciences, just to the extent that they are abstract
and exact, like mathematics and logic, are merely methods and tools for
converting experience into knowledge and applying the knowledge so
gained to practical uses.
IV. HISTORY, NATURAL HISTORY, AND SOCIOLOGY
Although it is possible to draw clear distinctions in theory between the
purpose and methods of history and sociology, in practice the two forms
of knowledge pass over into one another by almost imperceptible
gradations.
The sociological point of view makes its appearance in historical
investigation as soon as the historian turns from the study of "periods"
to the study of institutions. The history of institutions, that is to
say, the family, the church, economic institutions, political
institutions, etc., leads inevitably to comparison, classification, the
formation of class names or concepts, and eventually to the formulation
of law. In the process, history becomes natural history, and natural
history passes over into natural science. In short, history becomes
sociology.
Westermarck's _History of Human Marriage_ is one of the earliest
attempts to write the natural history of a social institution. It is
based upon a comparison and classification of marriage customs of widely
scattered peoples, living under varied physical and social conditions.
What one gets from a survey of this kind is not so much history as a
study of human behavior. The history of marriage, as of any other
institution, is, in other words, not so much an account of what certain
individuals or groups of individuals did at certain times and certain
places, as it is a description of the responses of a few fundamental
human instincts to a variety of social situations. Westermarck calls
this kind of history sociology.[16]
It is in the firm conviction that the history of human
civilization should be made an object of as scientific a
treatment as the history of organic nature that I write this
book. Like the phenomena of physical and psychical life those
of social life should be classified into certain groups and
each group investigated with regard to its origin and
development. Only when treated in this way can history lay
claim to the rank and honour of a science in the highest sense
of the term, as forming an important part of Sociology, the
youngest of the principal branches of learning.
Descriptive historiography has no higher object than that of
offering materials to this science.[17]
Westermarck refers to the facts which he has collected in his history of
marriage as phenomena. For the explanation of these phenomena, however,
he looks to the more abstract sciences.
The causes on which social phenomena are dependent fall within
the domain of different sciences--Biology, Psychology, or
Sociology. The reader will find that I put particular stress
upon the psychological causes, which have often been deplorably
overlooked, or only imperfectly touched upon. And more
especially do I believe that the mere instincts have played a
very important part in the origin of social institutions and
rules.[18]
Westermarck derived most of his materials for the study of marriage from
ethnological materials. Ethnologists, students of folklore (German
_Völkerkunde_), and archaeology are less certain than the historians of
institutions whether their investigations are historical or
sociological.
Jane Harrison, although she disclaims the title of sociologist, bases
her conception of the origin of Greek religion on a sociological theory,
the theory namely that "among primitive peoples religion reflects
collective feeling and collective thinking." Dionysius, the god of the
Greek mysteries, is according to her interpretation a product of the
group consciousness.
The mystery-god arises out of those instincts, emotions,
desires which attend and express life; but these emotions,
desires, instincts, in so far as they are religious, are at the
outset rather of a group than of individual consciousness....
It is a necessary and most important corollary to this
doctrine, that the form taken by the divinity reflects the
social structure of the group to which the divinity belongs.
Dionysius is the Son of his Mother because he issues from a
matrilinear group.[19]
This whole study is, in fact, merely an application of Durkheim's
conception of "collective representations."
Robert H. Lowie, in his recent volume, _Primitive Society_, refers to
"ethnologists and other historians," but at the same time asks: "What
kind of an historian shall the ethnologist be?"
He answers the question by saying that, "If there are laws of social
evolution, he [the ethnologist] must assuredly discover them," but at
any rate, and first of all, "his duty is to ascertain the course
civilization has _actually_ followed.... To strive for the ideals of
another branch of knowledge may be positively pernicious, for it can
easily lead to that factitious simplification which means
falsification."
In other words, ethnology, like history, seeks to tell what actually
happened. It is bound to avoid abstraction, "over-simplification," and
formulae, and these are the ideals of another kind of scientific
procedure. As a matter of fact, however, ethnology, even when it has
attempted nothing more than a description of the existing cultures of
primitive peoples, their present distribution and the order of their
succession, has not freed itself wholly from the influence of abstract
considerations. Theoretical problems inevitably arise for the solution
of which it is necessary to go to psychology and sociology. One of the
questions that has arisen in the study, particularly the comparative
study, of cultures is: how far any existing cultural trait is borrowed
and how far it is to be regarded as of independent origin.
In the historical reconstruction of culture the phenomena of
distribution play, indeed, an extraordinary part. If a trait
occurs everywhere, it might veritably be the product of some
universally operative social law. If it is found in a
restricted number of cases, it may still have evolved through
some such instrumentality acting under specific conditions that
would then remain to be determined by analysis of the cultures
in which the feature is embedded.... Finally, the sharers of a
cultural trait may be of distinct lineage but through contact
and borrowing have come to hold in common a portion of their
cultures....
Since, as a matter of fact, cultural resemblances abound
between peoples of diverse stock, their interpretation commonly
narrows to a choice between two alternatives. Either they are
due to like causes, whether these can be determined or not; or
they are the result of borrowing. A predilection for one or the
other explanation has lain at the bottom of much ethnological
discussion in the past; and at present influential schools both
in England and in continental Europe clamorously insist that
all cultural parallels are due to diffusion from a single
center. It is inevitable to envisage this moot-problem at the
start, since uncompromising championship of either alternative
has far-reaching practical consequences. For if every parallel
is due to borrowing, then sociological laws, which can be
inferred only from independently developing likenesses, are
barred. Then the history of religion or social life or
technology consists exclusively in a statement of the place of
origin of beliefs, customs and implements, and a recital of
their travels to different parts of the globe. On the other
hand, if borrowing covers only part of the observed parallels,
an explanation from like causes becomes at least the ideal goal
in an investigation of the remainder.[20]
An illustration will exhibit the manner in which problems originally
historical become psychological and sociological. Tyler in his _Early
History of Mankind_ has pointed out that the bellows used by the negro
blacksmiths of continental Africa are of a quite different type from
those used by natives of Madagascar. The bellows used by the Madagascar
blacksmiths, on the other hand, are exactly like those in use by the
Malays of Sumatra and in other parts of the Malay Archipelago. This
indication that the natives of Madagascar are of Malay origin is in
accordance with other anthropological and ethnological data in regard to
these peoples, which prove the fact, now well established, that they are
not of African origin.
Similarly Boas' study of the Raven cycle of American Indian mythology
indicated that these stories originated in the northern part of British
Columbia and traveled southward along the coast. One of the evidences
of the direction of this progress is the gradual diminution of
complexity in the stories as they traveled into regions farther removed
from the point of origin.
All this, in so far as it seeks to determine the point of origin,
direction, speed, and character of changes that take place in cultural
materials in the process of diffusion, is clearly history and ethnology.
Other questions, however, force themselves inevitably upon the attention
of the inquiring student. Why is it that certain cultural materials are
more widely and more rapidly diffused than others? Under what conditions
does this diffusion take place and why does it take place at all?
Finally, what is the ultimate source of customs, beliefs, languages,
religious practices, and all the varied technical devices which compose
the cultures of different peoples? What are the circumstances and what
are the processes by which cultural traits are independently created?
Under what conditions do cultural fusions take place and what is the
nature of this process?
These are all fundamentally problems of human nature, and as human
nature itself is now regarded as a product of social intercourse, they
are problems of sociology.
The cultural processes by which languages, myth, and religion have come
into existence among primitive peoples have given rise in Germany to a
special science. Folk-psychology (_Völkerpsychologie_) had its origin in
an attempt to answer in psychological terms the problems to which a
comparative study of cultural materials has given rise.
From two different directions ideas of folk-psychology have
found their way into modern science. First of all there was a
demand from the different social sciences
[_Geisteswissenschaften_] for a psychological explanation of
the phenomena of social life and history, so far as they were
products of social [_geistiger_] interaction. In the second
place, psychology itself required, in order to escape the
uncertainties and ambiguities of pure introspection, a body of
objective materials.
Among the social sciences the need for psychological
interpretation first manifested itself in the studies of
language and mythology. Both of these had already found outside
the circle of the philological studies independent fields of
investigation. As soon as they assumed the character of
comparative sciences it was inevitable that they should be
driven to recognize that in addition to the historical
conditions, which everywhere determines the concrete form of
these phenomena, there had been certain fundamental psychical
forces at work in the development of language and myth.[21]
The aim of folk-psychology has been, on the whole, to explain the
genesis and development of certain cultural forms, i.e., language, myth,
and religion. The whole matter may, however, be regarded from a quite
different point of view. Gabriel Tarde, for example, has sought to
explain, not the genesis, but the transmission and diffusion of these
same cultural forms. For Tarde, communication (transmission of cultural
forms and traits) is the one central and significant fact of social
life. "Social" is just what can be transmitted by imitation. Social
groups are merely the centers from which new ideas and inventions are
transmitted. Imitation is the social process.
There is not a word that you say, which is not the
reproduction, now unconscious, but formerly conscious and
voluntary, of verbal articulations reaching back to the most
distant past, with some special accent due to your immediate
surroundings. There is not a religious rite that you fulfil,
such as praying, kissing the icon, or making the sign of the
cross, which does not reproduce certain traditional gestures
and expressions, established through imitation of your
ancestors. There is not a military or civil requirement that
you obey, nor an act that you perform in your business, which
has not been taught you, and which you have not copied from
some living model. There is not a stroke of the brush that you
make, if you are a painter, nor a verse that you write, if you
are a poet, which does not conform to the customs or the
prosody of your school, and even your very originality itself
is made up of accumulated commonplaces, and aspires to become
commonplace in its turn.
Thus, the unvarying characteristic of every social fact
whatsoever is that it is imitative. And this characteristic
belongs exclusively to social facts.[22]
Tarde's theory of transmission by imitation may be regarded, in some
sense, as complementary, if not supplementary, to Wundt's theory of
origins, since he puts the emphasis on the fact of transmission rather
than upon genesis. In a paper, "Tendencies in Comparative Philology,"
read at the Congress of Arts and Sciences at the St. Louis Exposition in
1904, Professor Hanns Oertel, of Yale University, refers to Tarde's
theory of imitation as an alternative explanation to that offered by
Wundt for "the striking uniformity of sound changes" which students of
language have discovered in the course of their investigation of
phonetic changes in widely different forms of speech.
It seems hard to maintain that the change in a syntactical
construction or in the meaning of a word owes its universality
to a simultaneous and independent primary change in all the
members of a speech-community. By adopting the theory of
imitative spread, all linguistic changes may be viewed as one
homogeneous whole. In the second place, the latter view seems
to bring linguistic changes into line with the other social
changes, such as modifications in institutions, beliefs, and
customs. For is it not an essential characteristic of a social
group that its members are not co-operative in the sense that
each member actively participates in the production of every
single element which goes to make up either language, or
belief, or customs? Distinguishing thus between _primary_ and
_secondary_ changes and between the _origin_ of a change and
its _spread_, it behooves us to examine carefully into the
causes which make the members of a social unit, either
consciously or unconsciously, willing to accept the innovation.
What is it that determines acceptance or rejection of a
particular change? What limits one change to a small area,
while it extends the area of another? Before a final decision
can be reached in favor of the second theory of imitative
spread it will be necessary to follow out in minute detail the
mechanism of this process in a number of concrete instances; in
other words to fill out the picture of which Tarde (_Les lois
de l'imitation_) sketched the bare outlines. If his assumptions
prove true, then we should have here a uniformity resting upon
other causes than the physical uniformity that appears in the
objects with which the natural sciences deal. It would enable
us to establish a second group of uniform phenomena which is
psycho-physical in its character and rests upon the basis of
social suggestion. The uniformities in speech, belief, and
institutions would belong to this second group.[23]
What is true of the comparative study of languages is true in every
other field in which a comparative study of cultural materials has been
made. As soon as these materials are studied from the point of view of
their similarities rather than from the point of view of their
historical connections, problems arise which can only be explained by
the more abstract sciences of psychology or sociology. Freeman begins
his lectures on _Comparative Politics_ with the statement that "the
comparative method of study has been the greatest intellectual
achievement of our time. It has carried light and order into whole
branches of human knowledge which before were shrouded in darkness and
confusion. It has brought a line of argument which reaches moral
certainty into a region which before was given over to random
guess-work. Into matters which are for the most part incapable of
strictly external proof it has brought a form of strictly internal proof
which is more convincing, more unerring."
Wherever the historian supplements _external_ by _internal_ proof, he is
in a way to substitute a sociological explanation for historical
interpretation. It is the very essence of the sociological method to be
comparative. When, therefore, Freeman uses, in speaking of comparative
politics, the following language he is speaking in sociological rather
than historical terms:
For the purposes then of the study of Comparative Politics, a
political constitution is a specimen to be studied, classified,
and labelled, as a building or an animal is studied,
classified, and labelled by those to whom buildings or animals
are objects of study. We have to note the likenesses, striking
and unexpected as those likenesses often are, between the
political constitutions of remote times and places; and we
have, as far as we can, to classify our specimens according to
the probable causes of those likenesses.[24]
Historically sociology has had its origin in history. It owes its
existence as a science to the attempt to apply exact methods to the
explanation of historical facts. In the attempt to achieve this,
however, it has become something quite different from history. It has
become like psychology with which it is most intimately related, a
natural and relatively abstract science, and auxiliary to the study of
history, but not a substitute for it. The whole matter may be summed up
in this general statement: history interprets, natural science explains.
It is upon the interpretation of the facts of experience that we
formulate our creeds and found our faiths. Our explanations of
phenomena, on the other hand, are the basis for technique and practical
devices for controlling nature and human nature, man and the physical
world.
V. THE SOCIAL ORGANISM: HUMANITY OR LEVIATHAN?
After Comte the first great name in the history of sociology is Spencer.
It is evident in comparing the writings of these two men that, in
crossing the English Channel, sociology has suffered a sea change. In
spite of certain similarities in their points of view there are profound
and interesting differences. These differences exhibit themselves in the
different ways in which they use the term "social organism."
Comte calls society a "collective organism" and insists, as Spencer
does, upon the difference between an organism like a family, which is
made up of independent individuals, and an organism like a plant or an
animal, which is a physiological unit in which the different organs are
neither free nor conscious. But Spencer, if he points out the
differences between the social and the biological organisms, is
interested in the analogy. Comte, on the other hand, while he recognizes
the analogy, feels it important to emphasize the distinctions.
Society for Comte is not, as Lévy-Bruhl puts it, "a polyp." It has not
even the characteristics of an animal colony in which the individuals
are physically bound together, though physiologically independent. On
the contrary, "this 'immense organism' is especially distinguished from
other beings in that it is made up of separable elements of which each
one can feel its own co-operation, can will it, or even withhold it, so
long as it remains a direct one."[25]
On the other hand, Comte, although he characterized the social
_consensus_ and solidarity as "collective," nevertheless thought of the
relations existing between human beings in society--in the family, for
example, which he regards as the unit and model of all social
relations--as closer and more intimate than those which exist between
the organs of a plant or an animal. The individual, as Comte expressed
it, is an abstraction. Man exists as man only by participation in the
life of humanity, and "although the individual elements of society
appear to be more separable than those of a living being, the social
_consensus_ is still closer than the vital."[26]
Thus the individual man was, in spite of his freedom and independence,
in a very real sense "an organ of the Great Being" and the great being
was humanity. Under the title of humanity Comte included not merely all
living human beings, i.e., the human race, but he included all that body
of tradition, knowledge, custom, cultural ideas and ideals, which make
up the social inheritance of the race, an inheritance into which each of
us is born, to which we contribute, and which we inevitably hand on
through the processes of education and tradition to succeeding
generations. This is what Comte meant by the social organism.
If Comte thought of the social organism, the great being, somewhat
mystically as itself an individual and a person, Herbert Spencer, on the
other hand, thought of it realistically as a great animal, a leviathan,
as Hobbes called it, and a very low-order leviathan at that.[27]
Spencer's manner of looking at the social organism may be illustrated in
what he says about growth in "social aggregates."
When we say that growth is common to social aggregates and
organic aggregates, we do not thus entirely exclude community
with inorganic aggregates. Some of these, as crystals, grow in
a visible manner; and all of them on the hypothesis of
evolution, have arisen by integration at some time or other.
Nevertheless, compared with things we call inanimate, living
bodies and societies so conspicuously exhibit augmentation of
mass, that we may fairly regard this as characterizing them
both. Many organisms grow throughout their lives; and the rest
grow throughout considerable parts of their lives. Social
growth usually continues either up to times when the societies
divide, or up to times when they are overwhelmed.
Here, then, is the first trait by which societies ally
themselves with the organic world and substantially distinguish
themselves from the inorganic world.[28]
In this same way, comparing the characteristic general features of
"social" and "living bodies," noting likeness and differences,
particularly with reference to complexity of structure, differentiation
of function, division of labor, etc., Spencer gives a perfectly
naturalistic account of the characteristic identities and differences
between societies and animals, between sociological and biological
organizations. It is in respect to the division of labor that the
analogy between societies and animals goes farthest and is most
significant.
This division of labour, first dwelt upon by political
economists as a social phenomenon, and thereupon recognized by
biologists as a phenomenon of living bodies, which they called
the "physiological division of labour," is that which in the
society, as in the animal, makes it a living whole. Scarcely
can I emphasize enough the truth that in respect of this
fundamental trait, a social organism and an individual organism
are entirely alike.[29]
The "social aggregate," although it is "discrete" instead of
"concrete"--that is to say, composed of spatially separated units--is
nevertheless, because of the mutual dependence of these units upon one
another as exhibited in the division of labor, to be regarded as a
living whole. It is "a living whole" in much the same way that the plant
and animal communities, of which the ecologists are now writing so
interestingly, are a living whole; not because of any intrinsic
relations between the individuals who compose them, but because each
individual member of the community, finds in the community as a whole, a
suitable milieu, an environment adapted to his needs and one to which he
is able to adapt himself.
Of such a society as this it may indeed be said, that it "exists for the
benefit of its members, not its members for the benefit of society. It
has ever to be remembered that great as may be the efforts made for the
prosperity of the body politic, yet the claims of the body politic are
nothing in themselves, and become something only in so far as they
embody the claims of its component individuals."[30]
In other words, the social organism, as Spencer sees it, exists not for
itself but for the benefit of the separate organs of which it is
composed, whereas, in the case of biological organism the situation is
reversed. There the parts manifestly exist for the whole and not the
whole for the parts.
Spencer explains this paradoxical conclusion by the reflection that in
social organisms sentience is not localized as it is in biological
organisms. This is, in fact, the cardinal difference between the two.
There is no _social sensorium_.
In the one (the individual), consciousness is concentrated in a
small part of the aggregate. In the other (society), it is
diffused throughout the aggregate: all the units possess the
capacities for happiness and misery, if not in equal degrees,
still in degrees that approximate. As then, there is no social
sensorium, the welfare of the aggregate, considered apart from
that of the units, is not an end to be sought. The society
exists for the benefit of its members; not its members for the
benefit of the society.[31]
The point is that society, _as distinct from the individuals_ who
compose it, has no apparatus for feeling pain or pleasure. There are no
_social_ sensations. Perceptions and mental imagery are individual and
not social phenomena. Society lives, so to speak, only in its separate
organs or members, and each of these organs has its own brain and organ
of control which gives it, among other things, the power of independent
locomotion. This is what is meant when society is described as a
collectivity.
VI. SOCIAL CONTROL AND SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT
The fundamental problem which Spencer's paradox raises is that of social
control. How does a mere collection of individuals succeed in acting in
a corporate and consistent way? How in the case of specific types of
social group, for example an animal herd, a boys' gang, or a political
party, does the group control its individual members; the whole dominate
the parts? What are the specific _sociological_ differences between
plant and animal communities and human society? What kind of differences
are _sociological differences_, and what do we mean in general by the
expression "sociological" anyway?
Since Spencer's essay on the social organism was published in 1860,[32]
this problem and these questions, in one form or another, have largely
absorbed the theoretical interest of students of society. The attempts
to answer them may be said to have created the existing schools into
which sociologists are divided.
A certain school of writers, among them Paul Lilienfeld, Auguste
Schäffle, and René Worms, have sought to maintain, to extend, or modify
the biological analogy first advanced by Spencer. In doing so they have
succeeded sometimes in restating the problem but have not solved it.
René Worms has been particularly ingenious in discovering identities and
carrying out the parallelism between the social and the biological
organizations. As a result he has reached the conclusion that, as
between a social and a biological organism, there is no difference of
kind but only one of degree. Spencer, who could not find a "social
sensorium," said that society was conscious only in the individuals who
composed it. Worms, on the other hand, declares that we must assume the
existence of a social consciousness, even without a sensorium, because
we see everywhere the evidence of its existence.
Force manifests itself by its effects. If there are certain
phenomena that we can only make intelligible, provided we
regard them as the products of collective social consciousness,
then we are bound to assume the existence of such a
consciousness. There are many illustrations ... the attitude
for example, of a crowd in the presence of a crime. Here the
sentiment of indignation is unanimous. A murderer, if taken in
the act, will get summary justice from the ordinary crowd. That
method of rendering justice, "lynch law," is deplorable, but it
illustrates the intensity of the sentiment which, at the
moment, takes possession of the social consciousness.
Thus, always in the presence of great and common danger the
collective consciousness of society is awakened; for example
France of the Valois after the Treaty of Troyes, or modern
France before the invasion of 1791 and before the German
invasion in 1870; or Germany, herself, after the victories of
Napoleon I. This sentiment of national unity, born of
resistance to the stranger, goes so far that a large proportion
of the members of society do not hesitate to give their lives
for the safety and glory of the state, at such a moment the
individual comprehends that he is only a small part of a large
whole and that he belongs to the collectivity of which he is a
member. The proof that he is entirely penetrated by the social
consciousness is the fact that in order to maintain its
existence he is willing to sacrifice his own.[33]
There is no question that the facts of crowd excitement, of class,
caste, race, and national consciousness, do show the way in which the
individual members of a group are, or seem to be, dominated, at certain
moments and under certain circumstances, by the group as a whole. Worms
gives to this fact, and the phenomena which accompany it, the title
"collective consciousness." This gives the problem a name, to be sure,
but not a solution. What the purpose of sociology requires is a
description and an explanation. Under what conditions, precisely, does
this phenomenon of collective consciousness arise? What are the
mechanisms--physical, physiological, and social--by which the group
imposes its control, or what seems to be control, upon the individual
members of the group?
This question had arisen and been answered by political philosophers, in
terms of political philosophy, long before sociology attempted to give
an objective account of the matter. Two classic phrases, Aristotle's
"Man is a political animal" and Hobbes's "War of each against all,"
_omnes bellum omnium_, measure the range and divergence of the schools
upon this topic.
According to Hobbes, the existing moral and political order--that is to
say the organization of control--is in any community a mere artefact, a
control resting on consent, supported by a prudent calculation of
consequences, and enforced by an external power. Aristotle, on the other
hand, taught that man was made for life in society just as the bee is
made for life in the hive. The relations between the sexes, as well as
those between mother and child, are manifestly predetermined in the
physiological organization of the individual man and woman. Furthermore,
man is, by his instincts and his inherited dispositions, predestined to
a social existence beyond the intimate family circle. Society must be
conceived, therefore, as a part of nature, like a beaver's dam or the
nests of birds.
As a matter of fact, man and society present themselves in a double
aspect. They are at the same time products of nature and of human
artifice. Just as a stone hammer in the hand of a savage may be regarded
as an artificial extension of the natural man, so tools, machinery,
technical and administrative devices, including the formal organization
of government and the informal "political machine," may be regarded as
more or less artificial extensions of the natural social group.
So far as this is true, the conflict between Hobbes and Aristotle is not
absolute. Society is a product both of nature and of design, of instinct
and of reason. If, in its formal aspect, society is therefore an
artefact, it is one which connects up with and has its roots in nature
and in human nature.
This does not explain social control but simplifies the problem of
corporate action. It makes clear, at any rate, that as members of
society, men act as they do elsewhere from motives they do not fully
comprehend, in order to fulfil aims of which they are but dimly or not
at all conscious. Men are activated, in short, not merely by interests,
in which they are conscious of the end they seek, but also by instincts
and sentiments, the source and meaning of which they do not clearly
comprehend. Men work for wages, but they will die to preserve their
status in society, or commit murder to resent an insult. When men act
thus instinctively, or under the influence of the mores, they are
usually quite unconscious of the sources of the impulses that animate
them or of the ends which are realized through their acts. Under the
influence of the mores men act typically, and so representatively, not
as individuals but as members of a group.
The simplest type of social group in which we may observe "social
control" is in a herd or a flock. The behavior of a herd of cattle is,
to be sure, not so uniform nor so simple a matter as it seems to the
casual observer, but it may be very properly taken as an illustration of
the sort of follow-the-leader uniformity that is more or less
characteristic of all social groups. We call the disposition to live in
the herd and to move in masses, gregariousness, and this gregariousness
is ordinarily regarded as an instinct and undoubtedly is pretty largely
determined in the original nature of gregarious animals.
There is a school of thought which seeks in the so-called gregarious
instincts an explanation of all that is characteristically social in the
behavior of human beings.
The cardinal quality of the herd is homogeneity. It is clear
that the great advantage of the social habit is to enable large
numbers to act as one, whereby in the case of the hunting
gregarious animal strength in pursuit and attack is at once
increased to beyond that of the creatures preyed upon, and in
protective socialism the sensitiveness of the new unit to
alarms is greatly in excess of that of the individual member of
the flock.
To secure these advantages of homogeneity, it is evident that
the members of the herd must possess sensitiveness to the
behaviour of their fellows. The individual isolated will be of
no meaning, the individual as a part of the herd will be
capable of transmitting the most potent impulses. Each member
of the flock tending to follow its neighbour and in turn to be
followed, each is in some sense capable of leadership; but no
lead will be followed that departs widely from normal
behaviour. A lead will be followed only from its resemblance to
the normal. If the leader go so far ahead as definitely to
cease to be in the herd, he will necessarily be ignored.
The original in conduct, that is to say, resistiveness to the
voice of the herd, will be suppressed by natural selection; the
wolf which does not follow the impulses of the herd will be
starved; the sheep which does not respond to the flock will be
eaten.
Again, not only will the individual be responsive to impulses
coming from the herd, but he will treat the herd as his normal
environment. The impulse to be in and always to remain with the
herd will have the strongest instinctive weight. Anything which
tends to separate him from his fellows, as soon as it becomes
perceptible as such, will be strongly resisted.[34]
According to sociologists of this school, public opinion, conscience,
and authority in the state rest upon the natural disposition of the
animal in the herd to conform to "the decrees of the herd."
Conscience, then, and the feelings of guilt and of duty are the
peculiar possessions of the gregarious animal. A dog and a cat
caught in the commission of an offence will both recognize that
punishment is coming; but the dog, moreover, knows that he has
done _wrong_, and he will come to be punished, unwillingly it
is true, and as if dragged along by some power outside him,
while the cat's sole impulse is to escape. The rational
recognition of the sequence of act and punishment is equally
clear to the gregarious and to the solitary animal, but it is
the former only who understands that he has committed a
_crime_, who has, in fact, the _sense of sin_.[35]
The concepts upon which this explanation of society rests is
_homogeneity_. If animals or human beings act under all circumstances in
the same way, they will act or seem to act, as if they had a common
purpose. If everybody follows the crowd, if everyone wears the same
clothes, utters the same trite remarks, rallies to the same battles
cries and is everywhere dominated, even in his most characteristically
individual behavior, by an instinctive and passionate desire to conform
to an external model and to the wishes of the herd, then we have an
explanation of everything characteristic of society--except the
variants, the nonconformists, the idealists, and the rebels. The herd
instinct may be an explanation of conformity but it does not explain
variation. Variation is an important fact in society as it is in nature
generally.
Homogeneity and like-mindedness are, as explanations of the social
behavior of men and animals, very closely related concepts. In "like
response to like stimulus," we may discern the beginning of "concerted
action" and this, it is urged, is the fundamental social fact. This is
the "like-mindedness" theory of society which has been given wide
popularity in the United States through the writings of Professor
Franklin Henry Giddings. He describes it as a "developed form of the
instinct theory, dating back to Aristotle's aphorism that man is a
political animal."
Any given stimulus may happen to be felt by more than one
organism, at the same or at different times. Two or more
organisms may respond to the same given stimulus simultaneously
or at different times. They may respond to the same given
stimulus in like or in unlike ways; in the same or in different
degrees; with like or with unlike promptitude; with equal or
with unequal persistence. I have attempted to show that in like
response to the same given stimulus we have the beginning, the
absolute origin, of all concerted activity--the inception of
every conceivable form of co-operation; while in unlike
response, and in unequal response, we have the beginning of all
those processes of individuation, of differentiation, of
competition, which in their endlessly varied relations to
combination, to co-operation, bring about the infinite
complexity of organized social life.[36]
Closely related, logically if not historically, to Giddings' conception
of "like-mindedness" is Gabriel Tarde's conception of "imitation." If
for Giddings "like response to like stimulus" is the fundamental social
fact, for Tarde "imitation" is the process through which alone society
exists. Society, said Tarde, exists in imitation. As a matter of fact,
Tarde's doctrine may be regarded as a corollary to Giddings'. Imitation
is the process by which that like-mindedness, by which Giddings explains
corporate action, is effected. Men are not born like-minded, they are
made so by imitation.
This minute inter-agreement of minds and wills, which forms the
basis of the social life, even in troublous times--this
presence of so many common ideas, ends, and means, in the minds
and wills of all members of the same society at any given
moment--is not due, I maintain, to organic heredity, which
insures the birth of men quite similar to one another, nor to
mere identity of geographical environment, which offers very
similar resources to talents that are nearly equal; it is
rather the effect of that suggestion-imitation process which,
starting from one primitive creature possessed of a single idea
or act, passed this copy on to one of its neighbors, then to
another, and so on. Organic needs and spiritual tendencies
exist in us only as potentialities which are realizable under
the most diverse forms, in spite of their primitive similarity;
and, among all these possible realizations, the indications
furnished by some first initiator who is imitated determine
which one is actually chosen.[37]
In contrast with these schools, which interpret action in terms of the
herd and the flock--i.e., men act together because they act alike--is
the theory of Émile Durkheim who insists that the social group has real
corporate existence and that, in human societies at least, men act
together not because they have like purposes but a _common purpose_.
This common purpose imposes itself upon the individual members of a
society at the same time as an ideal, a wish and an obligation.
Conscience, the sense of obligation which members of a group feel only
when there is conflict between the wishes of the individual and the will
of the group, is a manifestation, _in_ the individual consciousness, of
the collective mind and the group will. The mere fact that in a panic or
a stampede, human beings will sometimes, like the Gadarene swine, rush
down a steep place into the sea, is a very positive indication of
like-mindedness but not an evidence of a common purpose. The difference
between an animal herd and a human crowd is that the crowd, what Le Bon
calls the "organized crowd," the crowd "in being" to use a nautical
term, is dominated by an impulse to achieve a purpose that is common to
every member of the group. Men in a state of panic, on the other hand,
although equally under the influence of the mass excitement, act not
corporately but individually, each individual wildly seeking to save his
own skin. Men in a state of panic have like purposes but no common
purpose. If the "organized crowd," "the psychological crowd," is a
society "in being," the panic and the stampede is a society "in
dissolution."
Durkheim does not use these illustrations nor does he express himself in
these terms. The conception of the "organized" or "psychological" crowd
is not his, but Le Bon's. The fact is that Durkheim does not think of a
society as a mere sum of particulars. Neither does he think of the
sentiments nor the opinions which dominate the social group as private
and subjective. When individuals come together _under certain
circumstances_, the opinions and sentiments which they held as
individuals are modified and changed under the influence of the new
contacts. Out of the fermentation which association breeds, a new
something (_autre chose_) is produced, an opinion and sentiment, in
other words, that is not the sum of, and not like, the sentiments and
opinions of the individuals from which it is derived. This new sentiment
and opinion is public, and social, and the evidence of this is the fact
that it imposes itself upon the individuals concerned as something more
or less external to them. They feel it either as an inspiration, a sense
of personal release and expansion, or as an obligation, a pressure and
an inhibition. The characteristic social phenomenon is just this control
by the group as a whole of the individuals that compose it. This fact of
control, then, is the fundamental social fact.
Now society also gives the sensation of a perpetual dependence.
Since it has a nature which is peculiar to itself and different
from our individual nature, it pursues ends which are likewise
special to it; but, as it cannot attain them except through our
intermediacy; it imperiously demands our aid. It requires that,
forgetful of our own interests, we make ourselves its
servitors, and it submits us to every sort of inconvenience,
privation, and sacrifice, without which social life would be
impossible. It is because of this that at every instant we are
obliged to submit ourselves to rules of conduct and of thought
which we have neither made nor desired, and which are sometimes
even contrary to our most fundamental inclinations and
instincts.
Even if society were unable to maintain these concessions and
sacrifices from us except by a material constraint, it might
awaken in us only the idea of a physical force to which we must
give way of necessity, instead of that of a moral power such as
religions adore. But as a matter of fact, the empire which it
holds over consciences is due much less to the physical
supremacy of which it has the privilege than to the moral
authority with which it is invested. If we yield to its orders,
it is not merely because it is strong enough to triumph over
our resistance; it is primarily because it is the object of a
venerable respect.
Now the ways of action to which society is strongly enough
attached to impose them upon its members, are, by that very
fact, marked with a distinctive sign provocative of respect.
Since they are elaborated in common, the vigour with which they
have been thought of by each particular mind is retained in all
the other minds, and reciprocally. The representations which
express them within each of us have an intensity which no
purely private states of consciousness could ever attain; for
they have the strength of the innumerable individual
representations which have served to form each of them. It is
society who speaks through the mouths of those who affirm them
in our presence; it is society whom we hear in hearing them;
and the voice of all has an accent which that of one alone
could never have. The very violence with which society reacts,
by way of blame or material suppression, against every
attempted dissidence, contributes to strengthening its empire
by manifesting the common conviction through this burst of
ardour. In a word, when something is the object of such a state
of opinion, the representation which each individual has of it
gains a power of action from its origins and the conditions in
which it was born, which even those feel who do not submit
themselves to it. It tends to repel the representations which
contradict it, and it keeps them at a distance; on the other
hand it commands those acts which will realize it, and it does
so, not by a material coercion or by the perspective of
something of this sort, but by the simple radiation of the
mental energy which it contains.[38]
But the same social forces, which are found organized in public opinion,
in religious symbols, in social convention, in fashion, and in
science--for "if a people did not have faith in science all the
scientific demonstrations in the world would be without any influence
whatsoever over their minds"--are constantly re-creating the old order,
making new heroes, overthrowing old gods, creating new myths, and
imposing new ideals. And this is the nature of the cultural process of
which sociology is a description and an explanation.
VII. SOCIAL CONTROL AND THE COLLECTIVE MIND
Durkheim is sometimes referred to, in comparison with other contemporary
sociologists, as a realist. This is a reference to the controversy of
the medieval philosophers in regard to the nature of concepts. Those who
thought a concept a mere class-name applied to a group of objects
because of some common characteristics were called nominalists. Those
who thought the concept was _real_, and not the name of a mere
collection of individuals, were realists. In this sense Tarde and
Giddings and all those writers who think of society as a collection of
actually or potentially _like-minded_ persons would be nominalists,
while other writers like Simmel, Ratzenhofer, and Small, who think of
society in terms of interaction and social process may be called
realists. They are realist, at any rate, in so far as they think of the
members of a society as bound together in a system of mutual influences
which has sufficient character to be described as a process.
Naturally this process cannot be conceived of in terms of space or
physical proximity alone. Social contacts and social forces are of a
subtler sort but not less real than physical. We know, for example, that
vocations are largely determined by personal competition; that the
solidarity of what Sumner calls the "in" or "we" group is largely
determined by its conflict with the "out" or "other" groups. We know,
also, that the status and social position of any individual inside any
social group is determined by his relation to all other members of that
group and eventually of all other groups. These are illustrations of
what is meant concretely by social interaction and social process and it
is considerations of this kind which seem to justify certain writers in
thinking of individual persons as "parts" and of society as a "whole" in
some other sense than that in which a dust heap is a whole of which the
individual particles are parts.
Society not only continues to exist _by_ transmission, _by_
communication, but it may fairly be said to exist _in_
transmission, _in_ communication. There is more than a verbal
tie between the words common, community, and communication.[39]
Communication, if not identical with, is at least a form of, what has
been referred to here as social interaction. But communication as Dewey
has defined the term, is something more and different than what Tarde
calls "inter-stimulation." Communication is a process by which we
"transmit" an experience from an individual to another but it is also a
process by which these same individuals get a common experience.
Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and
accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be
somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude
toward your experience changing; otherwise you resort to
expletives and ejaculations. Except in dealing with
commonplaces and catch phrases one has to assimilate,
imaginatively, something of another's experience in order to
tell him intelligently of one's own experience. All
communication is like art.[40]
Not only does communication involve the creation, out of experiences
that are individual and private, of an experience that is common and
public but such a common experience becomes the basis for a common and
public existence in which every individual, to greater or less extent,
participates and is himself a part. Furthermore, as a part of this
common life, there grows up a body of custom, convention, tradition,
ceremonial, language, social ritual, public opinion, in short all that
Sumner includes under the term "mores" and all that ethnologists include
under the term "culture."
The thing that characterizes Durkheim and his followers is their
insistence upon the fact that all cultural materials, and expressions,
including language, science, religion, public opinion, and law, since
they are the products of social intercourse and social interaction, are
bound to have an objective, public, and social character such as no
product of an individual mind either has or can have. Durkheim speaks of
these mental products, individual and social, as representations. The
characteristic product of the individual mind is the percept, or, as
Durkheim describes it, the "individual representation." The percept is,
and remains, a private and an individual matter. No one can reproduce,
or communicate to another, subjective impressions or the mental imagery
in the concrete form in which they come to the individual himself. My
neighbor may be able to read my "thoughts" and understand the motives
that impel me to action better than I understand myself, but he cannot
reproduce the images, with just the fringes of sense and feeling with
which they come to my mind.
The characteristic product of a group of individuals, in their efforts
to communicate is, on the other hand, something objective and
understood, that is, a gesture, a sign, a symbol, a word, or a concept
in which an experience or purpose that was private becomes public. This
gesture, sign, symbol, concept, or representation in which a common
object is not merely indicated, but in a sense created, Durkheim calls a
"collective representation."
Dewey's description of what takes place in communication may be taken as
a description of the process by which these collective representations
come into existence. "To formulate an experience," as Dewey says,
"requires getting outside of it, seeing it as another would see it,
considering what points of contact it has with the life of another so
that it may be gotten into such form that he can appreciate its
meaning." The result of such a conscious effort to communicate an
experience is to transform it. The experience, after it has been
communicated, is not the same for either party to the communication. To
publish or to give publicity to an event is to make of that event
something other than it was before publication. Furthermore, the event
as published is still something different from the event as reflected in
the minds of the individuals to whom the publication is addressed.
It will be evident upon reflection that public opinion is not the
opinion of all, nor even of a majority of the persons who compose a
public. As a matter of fact, what we ordinarily mean by public opinion
is never the opinion of anyone in particular. It is composite opinion,
representing a general tendency of the public as a whole. On the other
hand, we recognize that public opinion exists, even when we do not know
of any individual person, among those who compose the public, whose
private and personal opinion exactly coincides with that of the public
of which he or she is a part.
Nevertheless, the private and personal opinion of an individual who
participates in making public opinion is influenced by the opinions of
those around him, and by public opinion. In this sense every opinion is
public opinion.
Public opinion, in respect to the manner in which it is formed and the
manner in which it exists--that is to say relatively independent of the
individuals who co-operate to form it--has the characteristics of
collective representation in general. Collective representations are
objective, in just the sense that public opinion is objective, and they
impose themselves upon the individual as public opinion does, as
relatively but not wholly external forces--stabilizing, standardizing,
conventionalizing, as well as stimulating, extending, and generalizing
individual representations, percepts.
The collective representations are exterior to the individual
consciousness because they are not derived from the individuals
taken in isolation but from their convergence and union
(concours).... Doubtless, in the elaboration of the common
result, each (individual) bears his due share; but the private
sentiments do not become social except by combining under the
action of the forces _sui generis_ which association develops.
As a result of these combinations, and of the mutual
alterations which result therefrom, they (the private
sentiments) become something else (_autre chose_). A chemical
synthesis results, which concentrates, unifies, the elements
synthetized, and by that very process transforms them.... The
resultant derived therefrom extends then beyond (_deborde_) the
individual mind as the whole is greater than the part. To know
really what it is, one must take the aggregate in its totality.
It is this that thinks, that feels, that wills, although it may
not be able to will, feel, or act save by the intermediation of
individual consciousnesses.[41]
This, then, after nearly a century of criticism, is what remains of
Comte's conception of the social organism. If society is, as the
realists insist, anything more than a collection of like-minded
individuals, it is so because of the existence (1) of a social process
and (2) of a body of tradition and opinion--the products of this
process--which has a relatively objective character and imposes itself
upon the individual as a form of control, social control. This process
and its product are the social consciousness. The social consciousness,
in its double aspect as process and product, is the social organism. The
controversy between the realists and the nominalists reduces itself
apparently to this question of the objectivity of social tradition and
of public opinion. For the present we may let it rest there.
Meanwhile the conceptions of the social consciousness and the social
mind have been adopted by writers on social topics who are not at all
concerned with their philosophical implications or legitimacy. We are
just now seeing the first manifestations of two new types of sociology
which call themselves, the one rural and the other urban sociology.
Writers belonging to these two schools are making studies of what they
call the "rural" and the "urban" minds. In using these terms they are
not always quite certain whether the mind of which they are thinking is
a collective mind, in Durkheim's realistic sense of the word, or whether
it is the mind of the typical inhabitant of a rural or an urban
community, an instance of "like-mindedness," in the sense of Giddings
and the nominalists.
A similar usage of the word "mind," "the American mind," for example, is
common in describing characteristic differences in the attitudes of
different nations and their "nationals."
The origin of the phrase, "the American mind," was political.
Shortly after the middle of the eighteenth century, there began
to be a distinctly American way of regarding the debatable
question of British Imperial control. During the period of the
Stamp Act agitation our colonial-bred politicians and statesmen
made the discovery that there was a mode of thinking and
feeling which was native--or had by that time become a second
nature--to all the colonists. Jefferson, for example, employs
those resonant and useful words "the American mind" to indicate
that throughout the American colonies an essential unity of
opinion had been developed as regards the chief political
question of the day.[42]
Here again, it is not quite clear, whether the American mind is a name
for a characteristic uniformity in the minds of individual Americans;
whether the phrase refers rather to an "essential unity of opinion," or
whether, finally, it is intended to cover both the uniformity and the
unity characteristic of American opinion.
Students of labor problems and of the so-called class struggle, on the
other hand, use the term "psychology" in much the same way that the
students of rural and urban sociology use the term "mind." They speak of
the "psychology" of the laboring class, the "psychology" of the
capitalistic class, in cases where psychology seems to refer
indifferently either to the social attitudes of the members of a class,
or to attitude and morale of the class as a whole.
The terms "class-conscious" and "class-consciousness," "national" and
"racial" consciousness are now familiar terms to students although
they seem to have been used, first of all, by the so-called
"intelligentsia", who have been the leaders in the various types of mass
movement to which these terms apply. "Consciousness," in the sense in
which it is here used, has a similar, though somewhat different,
connotation than the word "mind" when applied to a group. It is a name
not merely for the attitudes characteristic of certain races or classes,
but for these attitudes when they are in the focus of attention of the
group, in the "fore-consciousness" to use a Freudian term. In this sense
"conscious" suggests not merely the submergence of the individual and
the consequent solidarity of the group, but it signifies a mental
mobilization and preparedness of the individual and of the group for
collective or corporate action. To be class-conscious is to be prepared
to act in the sense of that class.
There is implicit in this rather ambiguous popular usage of the terms
"social mind" and "social consciousness" a recognition of the dual
aspect of society and of social groups. Society may be regarded at the
same time from an individualistic and a collectivistic point of view.
Looking at it from the point of view of the individual, we regard as
social just that character of the individual which has been imparted to,
and impressed upon, him as a result of his participation in the life of
the group. Social psychology, from Baldwin's first studies of the
development of personality in the child to Ellwood's studies of the
society in its "psychological aspects" has been mainly concerned with
the investigation of the effects upon the individual of his contacts
with other individuals.[43]
On the other hand, we have had, in the description of the crowd and the
public by Le Bon, Tarde, Sighele, and their successors, the beginnings
of a study of collective behavior and "corporate action." In these two
points of view we seem to have again the contrast and the opposition,
already referred to, between the nominalistic and realistic conceptions
of society. Nominalism represented by social psychology emphasizes, or
seems to emphasize, the independence of the individual. Realism,
represented by collective psychology, emphasizes the control of the
group over the individual, of the whole over the part.
While it is true that society has this double aspect, the individual and
the collective, it is the assumption of this volume that the touchstone
of society, the thing that distinguishes a mere collection of
individuals from a society is not like-mindedness, but corporate action.
We may apply the term social to any group of individuals which is
capable of consistent action, that is to say, action, consciously or
unconsciously, directed to a common end. This existence of a common end
is perhaps all that can be legitimately included in the conception
"organic" as applied to society.
From this point of view social control is the central fact and the
central problem of society. Just as psychology may be regarded as an
account of the manner in which the individual organism, as a whole,
exercises control over its parts or rather of the manner in which the
parts co-operate together to carry on the corporate existence of the
whole, so sociology, speaking strictly, is a point of view and a method
for investigating the processes by which individuals are inducted into
and induced to co-operate in some sort of permanent corporate existence
which we call society.
To put this emphasis on corporate action is not to overlook the fact
that through this corporate action the individual member of society is
largely formed, not to say created. It recognized, however, that if
corporate action tends to make of the individual an instrument, as well
as an organic part, of the social group, it does not do this by making
him "like" merely; it may do so by making him "different." The division
of labor, in making possible an ever larger and wider co-operation among
men, has indirectly multiplied individual diversities. What
like-mindedness must eventually mean, if it is to mean anything, is the
existence of so much of a consensus among the individuals of a group as
will permit the group to act. This, then, is what is meant here by
society, the social organism and the social group.
Sociology, so far as it can be regarded as a fundamental science and not
mere congeries of social-welfare programs and practices, may be
described as the science of collective behavior. With this definition it
is possible to indicate in a general and schematic way its relation to
the other social sciences.
Historically, sociology has had its origin in history. History has been
and is the great mother science of all the social sciences. Of history
it may be said nothing human is foreign to it. Anthropology, ethnology,
folklore, and archaeology have grown up largely, if not wholly, to
complete the task which history began and answer the questions which
historical investigation first raised. In history and the sciences
associated with it, i.e., ethnology, folklore, and archaeology, we have
the concrete records of that human nature and experience which sociology
has sought to explain. In the same sense that history is the concrete,
sociology is the abstract, science of human experience and human nature.
[Illustration: FIG. 1]
On the other hand, the technical (applied) social sciences, that is,
politics, education, social service, and economics--so far as economics
may be regarded as the science of business--are related to sociology in
a different way. They are, to a greater or lesser extent, applications
of principles which it is the business of sociology and of psychology to
deal with explicitly. In so far as this is true, sociology may be
regarded as fundamental to the other social sciences.
VIII. SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL RESEARCH
Among the schools which, since Comte and Spencer, have divided
sociological thinking between them the realists have, on the whole,
maintained the tradition of Comte; the nominalists, on the other hand,
have preserved the style and manner, if not the substance, of Spencer's
thought. Later writers, however, realist as well as nominalist, have
directed their attention less to society than to societies, i.e., social
groups; they have been less interested in social progress than in
social process; more concerned with social problems than with social
philosophy.
This change marks the transformation of sociology from a philosophy of
history to a science of society. The steps in this transition are
periods in the history of the science, that is:
1. The period of Comte and Spencer; sociology, conceived in the grand
style, is a philosophy of history, a "science" of progress (evolution).
2. The period of the "schools"; sociological thought, dispersed among
the various schools, is absorbed in an effort to define its point of
view and to describe the kinds of facts that sociology must look for to
answer the questions that sociology asks.
3. The period of investigation and research, the period into which
sociology is just now entering.
Sociological research is at present (1921) in about the situation in
which psychology was before the introduction of laboratory methods, in
which medicine was before Pasteur and the germ theory of disease. A
great deal of social information has been collected merely for the
purpose of determining what to do in a given case. Facts have not been
collected to check social theories. Social problems have been defined in
terms of common sense, and facts have been collected, for the most part,
to support this or that doctrine, not to test it. In very few instances
have investigations been made, disinterestedly, to determine the
validity of a hypothesis.
Charles Booth's studies of poverty in London, which extended over
eighteen years and were finally embodied in seventeen volumes, is an
example of such a disinterested investigation. It is an attempt to put
to the test of fact the popular conception of the relation between wages
and welfare. He says:
My object has been to attempt to show the numerical relation
which poverty, misery, and depravity bear to regular earnings
and comparative comfort, and to describe the general conditions
under which each class lives.
If the facts thus stated are of use in helping social reformers
to find remedies for the evils which exist, or do anything to
prevent the adoption of false remedies, my purpose is answered.
It was not my intention to bring forward any suggestions of my
own, and if I have ventured here and there, and especially in
the concluding chapters, to go beyond my programme, it has been
with much hesitation.
With regard to the disadvantages under which the poor labour,
and the evils of poverty, there is a great sense of
helplessness: the wage earners are helpless to regulate their
work and cannot obtain a fair equivalent for the labour they
are willing to give; the manufacturer or dealer can only work
within the limits of competition; the rich are helpless to
relieve want without stimulating its sources. To relieve this
helplessness a better stating of the problems involved is the
first step.... In this direction must be sought the utility of
my attempt to analyze the population of a part of London.[44]
This vast study did, indeed, throw great light, not only upon poverty in
London, but upon human nature in general. On the other hand, it raised
more questions than it settled and, if it demonstrated anything, it was
the necessity, as Booth suggests, for a restatement of the problem.
Sociology seems now, however, in a way to become, in some fashion or
other, an experimental science. It will become so as soon as it can
state existing problems in such a way that the results in one case will
demonstrate what can and should be done in another. Experiments are
going on in every field of social life, in industry, in politics, and in
religion. In all these fields men are guided by some implicit or
explicit theory of the situation, but this theory is not often stated in
the form of a hypothesis and subjected to a test of the negative
instances. We have, if it is permitted to make a distinction between
them, investigation rather than research.
What, then, in the sense in which the expression is here used, is social
research? A classification of problems will be a sort of first aid in
the search for an answer.
1. _Classification of social problems._--Every society and every social
group, _capable of consistent action_, may be regarded as an
organization of the wishes of its members. This means that society rests
on, and embodies, the appetites and natural desires of the individual
man; but it implies, also, that wishes, in becoming _organized_, are
necessarily disciplined and controlled in the interest of the group as a
whole.
Every such society or social group, even the most ephemeral, will
ordinarily have (a) some relatively formal method of defining its aim
and formulating its policies, making them explicit, and (b) some
machinery, functionary, or other arrangement for realizing its aim and
carrying its policies into effect. Even in the family there is
government, and this involves something that corresponds to legislation,
adjudication, and administration.
Social groups, however, maintain their organizations, agencies, and all
formal methods of behavior on a basis and in a setting of instinct, of
habit, and of tradition which we call human nature. Every social group
has, or tends to have, its own culture, what Sumner calls "folkways,"
and this culture, imposing its patterns upon the natural man, gives him
that particular individuality which characterizes the members of groups.
Not races merely but nationalities and classes have marks, manners, and
patterns of life by which we infallibly recognize and classify them.
Social problems may be conveniently classified with reference to these
three aspects of group life, that is to say, problems of (a)
organization and administration, (b) policy and polity (legislation),
and (c) human nature (culture).
a) Administrative problems are mainly practical and technical. Most
problems of government, of business and social welfare, are technical.
The investigations, i.e., social surveys, made in different parts of the
country by the Bureau of Municipal Research of New York City, are
studies of local administration made primarily for the purpose of
improving the efficiency of an existing administrative machine and its
personnel rather than of changing the policy or purpose of the
administration itself.
b) Problems of policy, in the sense in which that term is used here,
are political and legislative. Most social investigations in recent
years have been made in the interest of some legislative program or for
the purpose of creating a more intelligent public opinion in regard to
certain local problems. The social surveys conducted by the Sage
Foundation, as distinguished from those carried out by the New York
Bureau of Municipal Research, have been concerned with problems of
policy, i.e., with changing the character and policy of social
institutions rather than improving their efficiency. This distinction
between administration and policy is not always clear, but it is always
important. Attempts at reform usually begin with an effort to correct
administrative abuses, but eventually it turns out that reforms must go
deeper and change the character of the institutions themselves.
c) Problems of human nature are naturally fundamental to all other
social problems. Human nature, as we have begun to conceive it in recent
years, is largely a product of social intercourse; it is, therefore,
quite as much as society itself, a subject for sociological
investigation. Until recent years, what we are now calling the human
factor has been notoriously neglected in most social experiments. We
have been seeking to reform human nature while at the same time we
refused to reckon with it. It has been assumed that we could bring about
social changes by merely formulating our wishes, that is, by "arousing"
public opinion and formulating legislation. This is the "democratic"
method of effecting reforms. The older "autocratic" method merely
decreed social changes upon the authority of the monarch or the ruling
class. What reconciled men to it was that, like Christian Science, it
frequently worked.
The oldest but most persistent form of social technique is that
of "ordering-and-forbidding"--that is, meeting a crisis by an
arbitrary act of will decreeing the disappearance of the
undesirable or the appearance of the desirable phenomena, and
the using arbitrary physical action to enforce the decree. This
method corresponds exactly to the magical phase of natural
technique. In both, the essential means of bringing a
determined effect is more or less consciously thought to reside
in the act of will itself by which the effect is decreed as
desirable and of which the action is merely an indispensable
vehicle or instrument; in both, the process by which the cause
(act of will and physical action) is supposed to bring its
effect to realization remains out of reach of investigation; in
both, finally, if the result is not attained, some new act of
will with new material accessories is introduced, instead of
trying to find and remove the perturbing causes. A good
instance of this in the social field is the typical legislative
procedure of today.[45]
2. _Types of social group._--The varied interests, fields of
investigation, and practical programs which find at present a place
within the limits of the sociological discipline are united in having
one common object of reference, namely, _the concept of the social
group_. All social problems turn out finally to be problems of group
life, although each group and each type of group has its own
distinctive problems. Illustrations may be gathered from the most
widely separated fields to emphasize the truth of this assertion.[46]
Religious conversion may be interpreted from one point of view as a
change from one social group to another. To use the language of
religious sentiment, the convert "comes out of a life of sin and enters
into a life of grace." To be sure, this change involves profound
disturbances of the personality, but permanence of the change in the
individual is assured by the breaking up of the old and the
establishment of new associations. So the process by which the immigrant
makes the transition from the old country to the new involves profound
changes in thought and habit. In his case the change is likely to take
place slowly, but it is not less radical on that account.
The following paragraph from a recent social survey illustrates, from a
quite different point of view, the manner in which the group is involved
in changes in community life.
In short, the greatest problem for the next few years in
Stillwater is the development of a _community consciousness_.
We must stop thinking in terms of city of Stillwater, and
country outside of Stillwater, and think in terms of
_Stillwater Community_. We must stop thinking in terms of small
groups and think in terms of the entire community, no matter
whether it is industry, health, education, recreation or
religion. Anything which is good will benefit the entire
community. Any weakness will be harmful to all. Community
co-operation in all lines indicated in this report will make
this, indeed, the Queen of the St. Croix.[47]
In this case the solution of the community problem was the creation of
"community consciousness." In the case of the professional criminal the
character of the problem is determined, if we accept the description of
a writer in the _Atlantic Monthly_, by the existence among professional
criminals of a primary group consciousness:
The professional criminal is peculiar in the sense that he
lives a very intense emotional life. He is isolated in the
community. He is in it, but not of it. His social life--for all
men are social--is narrow; but just because it is narrow, it is
extremely tense. He lives a life of warfare and has the
psychology of the warrior. He is at war with the whole
community. Except his very few friends in crime he trusts no
one and fears everyone. Suspicion, fear, hatred, danger,
desperation and passion are present in a more tense form in his
life than in that of the average individual. He is restless,
ill-humored, easily roused and suspicious. He lives on the
brink of a deep precipice. This helps to explain his passionate
hatred, his brutality, his fear, and gives poignant
significance to the adage that dead men tell no tales. He holds
on to his few friends with a strength and passion rare among
people who live a more normal existence. His friends stand
between him and discovery. They are his hold upon life, his
basis of security.
Loyalty to one's group is the basic law in the underworld.
Disloyalty is treason and punishable by death; for disloyalty
may mean the destruction of one's friends; it may mean the
hurling of the criminal over the precipice on which his whole
life is built.
To the community the criminal is aggressive. To the criminal
his life is one of defense primarily. The greater part of his
energy, of his hopes, and of his successes, centres around
escapes, around successful flight, around proper covering-up of
his tracks, and around having good, loyal, and trustworthy
friends to participate in his activities, who will tell no
tales and keep the rest of the community outside. The criminal
is thus, from his own point of view--and I am speaking of
professional criminals--living a life of defensive warfare with
the community; and the odds are heavy against him. He therefore
builds up a defensive psychology against it--a psychology of
boldness, bravado, and self-justification. The good
criminal--which means the successful one, he who has most
successfully carried through a series of depradations against
the enemy, the common enemy, the public--is a hero. He is
recognized as such, toasted and feasted, trusted and obeyed.
But always by a little group. They live in a world of their
own, a life of their own, with ideals, habits, outlook,
beliefs, and associations which are peculiarly fitted to
maintain the morale of the group. Loyalty, fearlessness,
generosity, willingness to sacrifice one's self, perseverance
in the face of prosecution, hatred of the common enemy--these
are the elements that maintain the morale, but all of them are
pointed against the community as a whole.[48]
The manner in which the principle of the primary group was applied at
Sing Sing in dealing with the criminal within the prison walls is a
still more interesting illustration of the fact that social problems are
group problems.[49]
Assuming, then, that every social group may be presumed to have its own
(a) administrative, (b) legislative, and (c) human-nature
problems, these problems may be still further classified with reference
to the type of social group. Most social groups fall naturally into one
or the other of the following classes:
a) The family.
b) Language (racial) groups.
c) Local and territorial communities: (i) neighborhoods, (ii) rural
communities, (iii) urban communities.
d) Conflict groups: (i) nationalities, (ii) parties, (iii) sects, (iv)
labor organizations, (v) gangs, etc.
e) Accommodation groups: (i) classes, (ii) castes, (iii) vocational,
(iv) denominational groups.
The foregoing classification is not quite adequate nor wholly logical.
The first three classes are more closely related to one another than
they are to the last two, i.e., the so-called "accommodation" and
"conflict" groups. The distinction is far-reaching, but its general
character is indicated by the fact that the family, language, and local
groups are, or were originally, what are known as primary groups, that
is, groups organized on intimate, face-to-face relations. The conflict
and accommodation groups represent divisions which may, to be sure, have
arisen within the primary group, but which have usually arisen
historically by the imposition of one primary group upon another.
Every state in history was or is a _state of classes_, a polity
of superior and inferior social groups, based upon distinctions
either of rank or of property. This phenomenon must, then, be
called the "State."[50]
It is the existence at any rate of conflict and accommodation within the
limits of a larger group which distinguishes it from groups based on
primary relations, and gives it eventually the character described as
"secondary."
When a language group becomes militant and self-conscious, it assumes
the character of a nationality. It is perhaps true, also, that the
family which is large enough and independent enough to be
self-conscious, by that fact assumes the character of a clan. Important
in this connection is the fact that a group in becoming group-conscious
changes its character. External conflict has invariably reacted
powerfully upon the internal organization of social groups.
Group self-consciousness seems to be a common characteristic of conflict
and accommodation groups and distinguishes them from the more elementary
forms of society represented by the family and the local community.
3. _Organization and structure of social groups._--Having a general
scheme for the classification of social groups, it is in order to
discover methods of analysis that are applicable to the study of all
types of groups, from the family to the sect. Such a scheme of analysis
should reveal not only the organization and structure of typical groups,
but it should indicate the relation of this organization and structure
to those social problems that are actual and generally recognized. The
sort of facts which are now generally recognized as important in the
study, not merely of society, but the problems of society are:
a) Statistics: numbers, local distribution, mobility, incidence of
births, deaths, disease, and crime.
b) Institutions: local distribution, classification (i.e., (i)
industrial, (ii) religious, (iii) political, (iv) educational, (v)
welfare and mutual aid), communal organization.
c) Heritages: the customs and traditions transmitted by the group,
particularly in relation to religion, recreation and leisure time, and
social control (politics).
d) Organization of public opinion: parties, sects, cliques, and the
press.
4. _Social process and social progress._--Social process is the name for
all changes which can be regarded as changes in the life of the group. A
group may be said to have a life when it has a history. Among social
processes we may distinguish (a) the historical, (b) the cultural,
(c) the political, and (d) the economic.
a) We describe as historical the processes by which the fund of social
tradition, which is the heritage of every permanent social group, is
accumulated and transmitted from one generation to another.
History plays the rôle in the group of memory in the individual. Without
history social groups would, no doubt, rise and decline, but they would
neither grow old nor make progress.
Immigrants, crossing the ocean, leave behind them much of their local
traditions. The result is that they lose, particularly in the second
generation, that control which the family and group tradition formerly
exercised over them; but they are, for that very reason, all the more
open to the influence of the traditions and customs of their adopted
country.
b) If it is the function of the historical process to accumulate and
conserve the common fund of social experience, it is the function of the
cultural process to shape and define the social forms and the social
patterns which each preceding generation imposes upon its successors.
The individual living in society has to fit into a pre-existing
social world, to take part in the hedonistic, economic,
political, religious, moral, aesthetic, intellectual activities
of the group. For these activities the group has objective
_systems_, more or less complex sets of schemes, organized
either by traditional association or with a conscious regard to
the greatest possible efficiency of the result, but with only a
secondary, or even with no interest in the particular desires,
abilities and experiences of the individuals who have to
perform these activities.
There is no pre-existing harmony whatever between the
individual and the social factors of personal evolution, and
the fundamental tendencies of the individual are always in some
disaccordance with the fundamental tendencies of social
control. Personal evolution is always a struggle between the
individual and society--a struggle for self-expression on the
part of the individual, for his subjection on the part of
society--and it is in the total course of this struggle that
the personality--not as a static "essence" but as a dynamic,
continually evolving set of activities--manifests and
constructs itself.[51]
c) In general, standards of behavior that are in the mores are not the
subject of discussion, except so far as discussion is necessary to
determine whether this or that act falls under one or the other of the
accepted social sanctions. The political as distinguished from the
cultural process is concerned with just those matters in regard to which
there is division and difference. Politics is concerned with issues.
The Negro, particularly in the southern states, is a constant theme of
popular discussion. Every time a Negro finds himself in a new situation,
or one in which the white population is unaccustomed to see him, the
thing provokes comment in both races. On the other hand, when a
southerner asks the question: "Would you want your daughter to marry a
Negro?" it is time for discussion to cease. Any questions of relations
between the races can always be immediately disposed of as soon as it is
seen to come, directly or indirectly, under the intolerable formula.
Political questions are matters of compromise and expediency.
Miscegenation, on the other hand, is contrary to the mores. As such the
rule against it is absolute.
The political process, by which a society or social group formulates its
wishes and enforces them, goes on within the limits of the mores and is
carried on by public discussion, legislation, and the adjudication of
the courts.
d) The economic process, so far as it can be distinguished from the
production and distribution of goods, is the process by which prices are
made and an exchange of values is effected. Most values, i.e., my
present social status, my hopes of the future, and memory of the past,
are personal and not values that can be exchanged. The economic process
is concerned with values that can be treated as commodities.
All these processes may, and do, arise within most but not every society
or social group. Commerce presupposes the freedom of the individual to
pursue his own profit, and commerce can take place only to the extent
and degree that this freedom is permitted. Freedom of commerce is,
however, limited on the one hand by the mores and on the other by formal
law, so that the economic process takes place ordinarily within
limitations that are defined by the cultural and the political
processes. It is only where there is neither a cultural nor a political
order that commerce is absolutely free.
The areas of (1) the cultural, (2) the political, (3) the economic
processes and their relations to one another may be represented by
concentric circles.
In this representation the area of widest cultural influences is
coterminous with the area of commerce, because commerce in its widest
extension is invariably carried on under some restraints of custom and
customary law. Otherwise it is not commerce at all, but something
predacious outside the law. But if the area of the economic process is
almost invariably coterminous with the widest areas of cultural
influence, it does not extend to the smaller social groups. As a rule
trade does not invade the family. Family interests are always personal
even when they are carried on under the forms of commerce. Primitive
society, within the limits of the village, is usually communistic. All
values are personal, and the relations of individuals to one another,
economic or otherwise, are preordained by custom and law.
The impersonal values, values for exchange, seem to be in any given
society or social group in inverse relation to the personal values.
The attempt to describe in this large way the historical, cultural,
political, and economic processes, is justified in so far as it enables
us to recognize that the aspects of social life, which are the
subject-matter of the special social sciences, i.e., history, political
science, and economics, are involved in specific forms of change that
can be viewed abstractly, formulated, compared, and related. The attempt
to view them in their interrelations is at the same time an effort to
distinguish and to see them as parts of one whole.
[Illustration: FIG. 2
a = area of most extended cultural influences and of commerce; b =
area of formal political control; c = area of purely personal
relationships, communism.]
In contrast with the types of social change referred to there are other
changes which are unilateral and progressive; changes which are
described popularly as "movements," mass movements. These are changes
which eventuate in new social organizations and institutions.
All more marked forms of social change are associated with certain
social manifestations that we call social unrest. Social unrest issues,
under ordinary conditions, as an incident of new social contacts, and is
an indication of a more lively tempo in the process of communication and
interaction.
All social changes are preceded by a certain degree of social and
individual disorganization. This will be followed ordinarily under
normal conditions by a movement of reorganization. All progress implies
a certain amount of disorganization. In studying social changes,
therefore, that, if not progressive, are at least unilateral, we are
interested in:
(1) Disorganization: accelerated mobility, unrest, disease, and crime as
manifestations and measures of social disorganization.
(2) Social movements (reorganization) include: (a) crowd movements
(i.e., mobs, strikes, etc.); (b) cultural revivals, religious and
linguistic; (c) fashion (changes in dress, convention, and social
ritual); (d) reform (changes in social policy and administration);
(e) revolutions (changes in institutions and the mores).
5. _The individual and the person._--The person is an individual who has
status. We come into the world as individuals. We acquire status, and
become persons. Status means position in society. The individual
inevitably has some status in every social group of which he is a
member. In a given group the status of every member is determined by his
relation to every other member of that group. Every smaller group,
likewise, has a status in some larger group of which it is a part and
this is determined by its relation to all the other members of the
larger group.
The individual's self-consciousness--his conception of his rôle in
society, his "self," in short--while not identical with his personality
is an essential element in it. The individual's conception of himself,
however, is based on his status in the social group or groups of which
he is a member. The individual whose conception of himself does not
conform to his status is an isolated individual. The completely isolated
individual, whose conception of himself is in no sense an adequate
reflection of his status, is probably insane.
It follows from what is said that an individual may have many "selves"
according to the groups to which he belongs and the extent to which each
of these groups is isolated from the others. It is true, also, that the
individual is influenced in differing degrees and in a specific manner,
by the different types of group of which he is a member. This indicates
the manner in which the personality of the individual may be studied
sociologically.
Every individual comes into the world in possession of certain
characteristic and relatively fixed behavior patterns which we call
instincts. This is his racial inheritance which he shares with all
members of the species. He comes into the world, also, endowed with
certain undefined capacities for learning other forms of behavior,
capacities which vary greatly in different individuals. These individual
differences and the instincts are what is called original nature.[52]