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

The critical essays on the static theories of Ad. Quetelet, A. Comte, and Herbert Spencer should have formed part of the present work; but, as the latter is already somewhat long, I am obliged to publish the essays separately.

living creature. According to him, this body is subject to a law of evolution similar to that of individuals: birth, youth, maturity, old age, and death. He investigated the distinction, so important from the static and dynamic point of view, between the constant causes, variable causes, and accidental causes. This distinction enabled him to show that the most variable factors are the social factors. He connected himself with socialism, as well as with positive sociology, by observing that the economic factors are the most general, those whose variations have the most direct influence upon all the other social phenomena. Thus variations in the price of rye and wheat influence natality, mortality, and criminality.

The conclusions are: first, that governments ought to diminish all the causes which produce great variations in the price of grain, consequently to reform institutions; second, that criminality in particular is a regular effect of our social organization. "It is society that prepares the crime, and the criminal is only the instrument that executes it."

Kant, the metaphysician most nearly approaching positive philosophy, held this physico-mechanical conception of societies. Moreover, all social economy, aside from the socialistic schools, still remained individualistic. Aside from the state, there were only individuals, molecules, a human dust. This dust the state prepares and combines in its laboratories, except that, with the liberal school, the social chemistry has no other law than liberty; no other order than its natural order.

An intermediate group between the latter school and the biologic school is that which no longer emphasizes the individual, but the group, the race, etc.; basing its studies wholly upon statistics. In fact, this point of view appears in the work of Quetelet, is developed in the school of Le Play, and is emphasized by Gumplowiez in a way that is unhappily too narrow.

The third current of positive sociology is represented by the different schools whose social conception is mainly biologic and organic. With Turgot, Condorcet, Cabanis, Dr. Burdin, SaintSimon, Auguste Comte, Schäffle, and Worms, we see the idea of a social structure gradually superseding the static and dynamic

conception borrowed from the physical sciences; yet even Comte continues to use the latter expression. In Germany, Herder and Krause represent an analogous philosophic transformation.

In this passage from the inorganic conception to the biologic conception of societies, the preponderant place is still accorded to the idea of order; progress is considered as the development of order. In fact, moreover, with Comte this is just what dynamics tends to mean. In the bio-social doctrines, the static point of view and the dynamic aspect are equally important. The first is more simple, but more fundamental; the second, more characteristic, but subordinate. In biology the simultaneity of phenomena is more important than their succession.

It was otherwise as soon as the progress of psychology completed the point of view of the biological school. Already, even with Comte, ideological sociology, his law of the three states, is psychic, but psycho-collective, and even his social statics is of the same nature.

Eventually, as in the case of Herbert Spencer, the successive aspect of psychology becomes more and more predominant. The evolutionary conception dominates to the extent of almost completely absorbing the static aspect. It is no longer the organ that determines and explains the function, or the structure society, but the function determines and explains the organ. This is evolution itself. It is also proper to notice here the exaggerated and too exclusive tendency of a derivative sociological school which assimilates the life of societies to an entirely psychic life, either recognizing a real resemblance between the nervous system and the social system (Lilienfeld), or developing in a one-sided way both the resemblances and differences between collective psychology and psycho-physiology (E. Tarde, Lebon, Sighele, Simmel, L. F. Ward, Giddings, Baldwin, Izoulet).

This evolution of sociology was, however, both logical and natural. Integral and confused in the beginning, it endeavored successively to explain social phenomena by the laws of the antecedent sciences, keeping pace with the advancing organiza

tion of these sciences. Next, it demanded the answer to the enigma from the particular social sciences. Finally, after having concluded, with Karl Marx and A. Loria, for example, that the most general interpretation must be economic, it arrived, by a true law of apparent return to the origin, at the knowledge that the interpretation of the social world must be sought from the whole, both of inorganic and organic nature, of which the societies are the spontaneous development; and, at the same time, from the ensemble of the seven classes of social phenomena, in the order of importance which their hierarchic classification has revealed to us. In short, sociology can be only an integral conception of the highest combination formed by the inorganic and organic factors, land and population, in the many social forms.

Our work would be incomplete if we did not also mention, as the fourth and last affluent of positive sociology, the contributions of the scientific specialists who have consecrated their labors to the study of one or more of the seven classes of particular sciences, including the elementary and abstract as well as the formal and concrete. Among these contributions, before all others, are those of the economic scientists, who belong to the sociological school because of their method, and because they never lose sight of the correlation of economics with the whole of social science. In particular, it is necessary to recall the works of A. Thierry, disciple of Saint-Simon, those of John Stuart Mill, de Laveleye, Fustel de Coulanges, Wagner, Mommsen, Paul Viollet, Morgan, H. Sumner Maine, Max Müller, etc., etc. All, in their different specialties, are sociologists; it is chiefly by their works, which serve as an intermediary between elementary sociology (represented by comparative and COordinated statics) on the one hand, and general sociology on the other, that the latter science is destined to be perfected through the continued progress of studies relating to the structure and evolution of particular institutions and societies.1

In our Elementary Sociology there is a methodical list of many works whose study we recommend to those who are preparing themselves for the study of general sociology. (Bruxelles: F. Larcier, 1894-95.)