2.

through small successes and small progress; it is made up of small partial adaptations, by no means co-ordinated at their origin, of small expedients always imperfect and provisional. This law is entirely instinctive, and though the solutions it proposes are designed for the immediate difficulty, these ends soon become means in solving the next problem.

The law of activity directed toward the maximum social utility. The effects of this law are first the increasing mediatization, and, second, the increasing deper. sonalization of social values. Things formerly sought as means have come to be sought as ends, e. g., riches, comfort, power. Along with this mediatization comes the depersonalization of social values, the loss of the imprint of the individual who created them; e. g., property, labor, art, literature.

taken we shall make professional criminals as rare as wolves. It will be many a long day, no matter what measures are devised, before this happy stage of progress is reached. No delusion can be greater than to suppose that it can be reached by resorting once more to the rusty, barbarous, and obsolete weapons of our ancestors. But I do believe, if we put our penal law, as Lord Roseberry would say, on an efficient and business-like footing in the matter of juvenile offenders and in the matter of prison treatment, that we can largely reduce the proportions of professional crime.-WILLIAM DOUGLAS MORRISON, in International Journal of Ethics, October, 1902.

T. J. R.

Language and its Words: Their Sociological Factors. — Man is the product of an automatic evolution. But articulate language does not owe its marvelous development to any such unconscious principle. Its development has been very complex: the word and the gesture naturally going together enforce each other, but they also at the same time oppose each other. Their association is in reality a struggle for their individual existences. In this contest the word has the advantage, due no doubt partly to its intrinsic superiority - for language is above all things vocal; the gesture exists, it is true, but merely as an accompaniment of the word — but due also, and especially, to the pressure of "social" necessities. That is to say, articulate language is, no doubt, partly the work of nature, but the work of man much more. This laborious birth and development has been neither mechanical nor deliberate, neither conscious nor unconscious, because it has been neither biological nor psychological ; but it has been at once both the one and the other, because it has been sociological. In the social process man makes the instruments of progress, yet he himself is an instrument; he passes from the pursuit of ends immediate and perceived to the pursuit of ends remote and unperceived. Thus it is with all social development; thus it is with language; it becomes both means and end, makes and is made, and passes from the stage of immediate, unreflective use to the removed, mediated, deliberative character.

If we study all the different kinds of language we shall find unmistakable evidences of this “social ” character or origin of language. The words of a language fall into three groups that name social facts or relations, viz.: (1) those of intercourse, from primitive group organization, group.contests, to modern commerce and thought transmission; (2) those of labor, from immediate food-getting by the primitive man to the highly organized industry of our present century, from the labor of war to the occupations of peace; and (3) those of ceremony from the early worship of all “moving” things to the worship of the one Hebrew Ġod; from the earliest instinct of dependence to the Jewish sacrifice and the present memorials. Intimate connections bind these three into groups together, and bind them into a language. -L. GERARD-VARET, “Le langage et la parole: leurs facteurs sociologiques,” in Revue philosophique, October, 190

T. J. R.

CHAPTER II,

THE ANTECEDENTS OF SOCIOLOGY. BETWEEN 1815 and 1830 A. Loria, in his excellent book Les bases économiques de la constitution sociale, wrote that, with the mechanical progress of industry and under the protection of a somewhat peaceful régime, a revolution, both economic and political, was taking place, characterized by the concentration of movable wealth; that in almost the whole of Europe a division of capitalistic power between agriculture, on the one hand, and trade and manufacture, on the other, coincided with a corresponding division of political power between the conservative party and the liberal party. We may accept the description of this phenomenon in its main outlines. Marx has also stated it, placing it in a more remote period, and, in reality, it appears in the most ancient civilizations, although under partly different conditions. In fact, the error of Marx and Loria is in not having observed that from remotest antiquity even the minor civilizations have passed through an analogous evolution, which, however, was different in secondary points, and less extended.

This economic and political concentration and differentiation had at that time (as always ) as its consequence, as a true reflex action, the concentration of the industrial laboring forces, on the one hand, and the separation and dispersion of the agricultural laboring forces, on the other. According to our view, this phenomenon appears even in slave societies — for example, in the Grecian and Roman civilizations, as well as in the old southern slave states of the United States.

In the present, as in the past, this situation gives rise to the principal affluent of positive sociology, socialism, whose most illustrious modern precursors are Robert Owen, in England (1771-1858), and Charles Fourier, in France (1772-1837).

This socialism becomes more and more conscious of itself; it proceeds to the criticism of society and constructs plans for new societies, which are now no longer mere Utopias, but which already appeal to the sanction of observation and experiment. Socialism culminates with the school of Proudhon, in France (1809–67), and that of Marx in Germany (1818–83). Beginning with these writers, it applies the inductive and historical method to the study of social phenomena. With César de Paepe and Benoît Malon, the too exclusively economic concept of Marx, although retaining its fundamental basis, is transformed into an integral socialism, that is to say, into a complete view of the whole of society considered as a systematic and truly organic arrangement of co-ordinated parts. Further, socialism no longer refuses to accept the positive methods, especially the experimental method; it proceeds from the particular to the general, from the simple to the complex. For this reason it submits its ideal structure to the proof of successive experiments. Therefore it is ready for amalgamation with positive sociology. The most eminent contemporary sociologists are socialists; likewise, the socialists are sociologists.

The second current of positive sociology was essentially scientific. Up to the present time, it has been too much neglected by historians of social science, but its importance will continue to increase. In the seventeenth century, it was represented by Pascal, Fermat, Leibnitz, Huyghens, the Grand Pensionary De Witt, Hudde, Halley; in the eighteenth century, by the Bernouillé brothers, d'Alembert, Euler, Buffon. This scientific school began as a true science of the state. At first, it was concerned only with calculations of probabilities, with tables of mortality which were to serve as the basis of loans in the form of life annuities. With Halley (1693), and especially with Buffon, it was for the time applied to all the phenomena of life and death. Finally, by the end of the eighteenth century, and especially in the beginning of the nineteenth, with La Place and Joseph Fourier, it was extended to social phenomena, especially to social mechanics and statics. The same movement took place in France, England, Holland, Germany, and Italy. Nothing proves better than this fact the organic character of this scientific movement, as I have shown in the numerous lectures which I have devoted to the critical exposé of the theories of this school, of which Ad. Quetelet was one of the most eminent representatives (1796-1874).”

Quetelet is to be associated with these immediate precursors, the majority of whom, like himself, were mathematicians, astronomers, natural philosophers. They belong in a common group because of the same atomistic and mechanical conception of society; and by this conception they are also connected with the principal founders of political economy. Quetelet did not distinguish society from the state. According to him, all deviations result from natural or artificial disturbances; progress consists in following the average of these deviations; the social structure is the most complete equilibrium possible. The center of this equilibrium is the average man.

“The average man is to a nation what the center of gravity is to a body; it is by this consideration that we are led to an understanding of all the phenomena of equilibrium and of movement.”

In antiquity, Aristotle and Archimedes were the precursors of this conception; the former extended it from mechanics to the moral and political sciences. Quetelet, however-and it is this which distinguishes scientific determinism in general from fatalism — considered social phenomena as modifiable and perfectible. In the first place, he likened society to an immense