Pure Sociology: A treatise on the origin and spontaneous development of society

PART I

TAXIS

1

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF PURE SOCIOLOGY

The terms pure and applied may be used in sociology in the same sense as in other sciences. Pure science is theoretical, applied science practical. The first seeks to establish the principles of the science, the second points out their actual or possible applications. It is in this sense simply that I shall use the terms. Whatever further explanation may be necessary will be due to the special character of sociology as a science.

The titles of the chapters, and especially the names I have given to the three parts into which this work is divided, sufficiently attest the theoretical character of the work. The first part deals with the order or arrangement of sociological data; the remainder of the work deals with their origin and nature, first from the standpoint of nature, and then from the standpoint of intelligent beings.

In view of the flood of sociological literature in our time, notwithstanding the extreme youth of the science, it would be presumptuous to hope to contribute anything absolutely new. Even in the seventeenth century, La Bruyère thought that he had come into the world too late to produce anything new, that nature and life were preoccupied, and that description and sentiment had been long exhausted. And yet, throughout the eighteenth century men continued to thrash literary straw most vigorously. But although the age of literature as an end has passed, and we are living in the age of science, and although in many sciences new truth is being daily brought to light, still, such is the nature of sociology, that this is not true of it unless we understand by truth, as we certainly may, the discovery of new relations. So far as any other meaning of truth is concerned, I have probably already offered the most that I possess, and the chief task that now confronts me is that of endeavoring to organize the facts of sociology, and to bring them together into something like a system. I shall not therefore apologize for the restatement of facts or principles, assuming that the reader will realize that it is done for a different object from any that I have formerly had in view.

A logically organized system of sociology thus necessarily becomes a philosophy. Not that it is a speculation, which would imply that it abandoned the domain of fact, but from the very wealth of facts which such a highly complex science necessarily inherits from the entire series of simpler sciences, its proper treatment demands deep plunges into those domains in order to discover and trace out the roots of social phenomena. The method of pure science is research, and its object is knowledge. In pure sociology the essential nature of society is the object pursued. But nothing can be said to be known until the antecedent conditions are known, out of which it has sprung. Existing facts must be interpreted in the light of past processes, and developed products must be explained through their embryonic stages and phyletic ancestors. This is as true of social structures as of organic structures. It is this filiation, this historical development, this progressive evolution, that renders sociology such an all-embracing field, and which makes its proper treatment so laborious, and at the same time so interesting. It is this, also, that brings contempt upon it when its treatment is attempted by those who are not equipped for the task.

By pure sociology, then, is meant a treatment of the phenomena and laws of society as it is, an explanation of the processes by which social phenomena take place, a search for the antecedent conditions by which the observed facts have been brought into existence, and an ætiological diagnosis that shall reach back as far as the state of human knowledge will permit into the psychologic, biologic, and cosmic causes of the existing social state of man. But it must be a pure diagnosis, and all therapeutic treatment is rigidly excluded. All ethical considerations, in however wide a sense that expression may be understood, must be ignored for the time being, and attention concentrated upon the effort to determine what actually is. Pure sociology has no concern with what society ought to be, or with any social ideals. It confines itself strictly with the present and the past, allowing the future to take care of itself. It totally ignores the purpose of the science, and aims at truth wholly for its own sake.

A fortiori, the pure method of treatment keeps aloof from all criticism and all expressions of approval, from all praise or blame, as wholly inapplicable to that which exists of necessity. Auguste Comte, in one of his early essays, 1822, reflects the true spirit of pure science in the following words:—

Admiration and disapprobation should be banished with equal severity from all positive science, since every preoccupation of this kind has for its direct and inevitable effect to impede or divert examination. Astronomers, physicists, chemists, and physiologists do not admire, neither do they blame, their respective phenomena; they observe them.⁠*

Gumplowicz has put the same thought into the following form:—

Sociology must necessarily abstain from criticising nature. It is only interested in the facts and their regular occurrence. From the sociological point of view there is no ground for asking whether things could not have been other than they are, or whether they could not have been better, for social phenomena are necessarily derived from human nature and the nature of human relations.⁠*

This strictly objective treatment also necessitates the looking of facts in the face, however ugly they may be. It is no more the part of pure sociology to apologize for the facts, than to extol or condemn them. Still less can it afford to deny what really exists, or attempt to minimize it or explain it away, merely because it is abhorrent to certain refined perceptions of highly developed races. Such a remark may seem like a truism, but nothing is more certain than that every scientific truth which has at first seemed repugnant to man, has had to be established against powerful opposition, often from eminent men of science in the domain to which it belonged, growing out of nothing but the wholly unscientific aversion to admitting its possibility—the desire to defend the race from the supposed humiliation of such an admission.

Nor does this strict adherence to the facts of nature involve, as certain prominent philosophers seem to suppose, a defense of nature’s methods as necessarily the best possible, and their commendation as patterns and models for men to copy and follow. To do this is to violate the canon of pure science: nil admirari. This sort of scientific nature-worship, besides not being really scientific in its spirit, is pernicious as promulgating a false doctrine that applied sociology readily disproves, but which, if it becomes current, as it seemed at one time to be likely to do, takes its place among the erroneous Weltanschauungen that have one after another stood in the path of human progress.

We cannot too strongly emphasize the paradox that pure science really rests on faith. Faith, as Dr. Starcke puts it, that causation is universal.⁠* Faith not only that all effects have causes but also that all causes have effects; faith that whatever is is worthy, and that whatever is worth being is worth knowing; and finally faith, since this cannot be wholly suppressed, that some beneficial result will follow the discovery of truth. But this faith need not go so far as to become anthropocentric and optimistic, so as to divert the investigator from the single pursuit of truth and carry him off in a vain search for the supposed necessary uses of facts or for strained analogies and imaginary harmonies.

Another reef to be shunned is the notion that was formerly quite prevalent and which is still continually coming into view, that science consists in the discovery of facts. There is not a single science of which this is true, and a much more nearly correct definition would be that science consists in reasoning about facts. This is perhaps best illustrated in geology, where the facts—rocks—are infinitely older than human history or the human race, and most of them have stared the world in the face throughout all ages, but were never known till men began to reason about them and interpret them. But the truth comes nearer home in the more practical sciences like physics and chemistry. The forces of nature and the properties of substances have always existed, but they were of comparatively little use until the age of experimentation which involves the closest reasoning. The electricity that lights our houses and propels our cars was here all the time, and could just as well have been used two thousand or four thousand years ago as now, if any one had thought out and worked out its true nature, as has so recently been done.

The term pure sociology has been used considerably of late in the sense of regarding it as an exact science. In this it is usually attempted to reduce its laws to mathematical principles, to deduce equations and draw curves expressing those laws. The best work of this kind has been done in the domain of economics by men like Cournot, Gossen, Jevons, and Walras, but most of these laws are in a proper sense sociological, and have a far-reaching significance for sociology. I fully recognize the importance of such studies, but I shall only thus briefly mention them in this chapter, deferring the full treatment of so fundamental a subject to the chapter on methodology (Chapter IV), under which head I class it.

* Plan des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société. Reprinted as Appendix to Vol. IV of the Système de Politique Positive, 1853, p. 114.

* Précis de Sociologie, Paris, 1896, p. 222.

* Revue Internationale de Sociologie , janvier, 1898, p. 17. Compare also the address of Andrew D. White at the farewell banquet to Professor Tyndall, Pop. Sci. Monthly , Vol. II, April, 1873, pp. 736-739.

2

ESTABLISHMENT OF THE SCIENCE

Ido not claim that sociology has as yet been established as a science. I only maintain that it is in process of establishment, and this by the same method by which all other sciences are established. Every independent thinker has his system. It is always based on some one leading idea or unitary principle which binds all its parts together, and this principle is the chief matter with the author. The system constitutes a means of thoroughly illustrating his ruling idea. This is not only true of sociology but of all systems of philosophy. This is as it should be, and illustrates the march of ideas and the progress of science in general.

HOW SCIENCE ADVANCES

It will be well to pause a moment and consider this question of how science advances. The progress of science is no even straightforward march. It is in the highest degree irregular and fitful. And yet there is a certain method in it. It is the work of a vast army of workers, and each individual works more or less independently. Scarcely any two are working at exactly the same thing, and when they are their individual peculiarities, their differences of training, and their different environments are certain to render the product different. The history of scientific research in any one of the great fields of investigation is an interesting subject for analysis. Even in astronomy there is great diversity, but especially in laboratory research, as in physics, chemistry, and biology, is this feature made prominent. Whether it relates to the law of gravitation, to the nature of sound, to spectrum analysis, to the different kinds of rays, to the properties of the various substances and gases, to the formation of chemical compounds, including the complex organic compounds, to the study of protoplasm, to the investigation of cells and unicellular organisms, to the origin of tissues and their distribution in the metazoan body, to the phenomena of reproduction, or to the nature and functions of nerves and of the brain,—whatever the field maybe, the general method of all earnest scientific research is the same. Every investigator chooses some special line and pushes his researches forward along that line as far as his facilities and his powers will permit. If he is a master, he soon exhausts the resources and appliances of the libraries and laboratories and proceeds to construct a technique of his own for his special purposes. He observes and experiments and records the results. Whenever important results are reached, he publishes them. He not only publishes the results, but he describes his methods. He tells the world not only what he has found, but how he found it.

If the results thus announced are at all novel or startling, others working along similar lines immediately take them up, criticise them, and make every effort to disprove them. Working under somewhat different conditions, with different subjects or specimens and different tools, and possessing different personal peculiarities of mind and character, some of these rivals are certain to bring out something new. Part of the results claimed by the first investigator will be disproved or shown to bear a different interpretation from that given them. Part of them will probably stand the fire and after repeated verification be admitted by all. These represent the permanent advance made in that particular science. But no one investigator can establish anything. Nothing is established until it has passed through this ordeal of general criticism and repeated verification from the most adverse points of view.

Now, each one of the many workers is doing the same thing as the one here considered, only every one chooses a different line and pushes his researches out in a different direction. Thus a thousand lines of research are projected into the unknown from every field of scientific investigation. There is little or no attempt to coordinate the new facts. They have a linear connection with the series of antecedent facts pursued by each, but they do not anastomose, so to speak, with the similar lines run out by others. Nevertheless, ultimately some of the earlier proximal points that have been verified and established will spontaneously become associated and correlated, forming a sort of web between the bases of the lines, which later become the accepted boundary of the established science. Finally the synthetic mind comes forward and performs the work of coordination, to be followed by the text-book writer, who more or less successfully puts the science in the way of social appropriation.

Such is the apparently desultory and haphazard, but really methodical way in which all science advances. True, it is crude and primitive. It is not at all economical, but extremely wasteful in energy and effort. It is a typical method of nature as distinguished from the telic method or method of foresight and intelligence, but it accomplishes its purpose and has given us all the established truth we possess. I have sometimes compared it to the way in which certain shore lines are formed on coasts that are slowly rising, especially in regions where a retreating ice sheet has done its part of the work. If you will glance at a map of the west coast of Scotland, of the east coast of Nova Scotia, or of the south shores of Maine, you will understand this comparison. These shores consist of innumerable tongues of land projecting into the sea, separated by friths or inlets and wider bays. These inlets formerly extended much farther into the land, but the peninsulas had then only begun to form. As the land rose, their bases, which were then much farther inland, gradually coalesced to form the main coast, while the ridges between the furrows plowed by the ice emerged from the water in the form of tongues such as we now see. These may be conceived as being thrust out from the shore something after the analogy of the lines of scientific research that I have described, uniting at their bases to form a permanent domain. Even the islands, of which there are many, have their counterparts in those isolated discoveries of science, like the Röntgen rays, which seem for a time like islands in the sea of the unknown.

Another favorite comparison of mine, and one with the subject of which I am personally more familiar than I am with seacoasts, is with the progress of a prairie fire, such as used to sweep across the mainly treeless grassy plains of northern Iowa. With a front of ten to twenty miles such a fire would advance at the rate of five to ten miles an hour, consuming everything in its way. But the line of flame, which could be distinctly traced, especially in the night, to a great distance by the eye, was never straight, but in consequence of certain checks at one point and specially favorable conditions at another, it would present great irregularities. Long tongues of fire would be seen projecting far in advance of the main line, leaving, narrow unburned tracts between them, and every other conceivable form of indentation and irregularity would mark the boundary of the advancing conflagration. In fact this would have a great resemblance to the coasts I have referred to. Occasional sparks carried far in advance by the high wind which the fire alone was capable of generating, would ignite the grass some distance from the point from which it emanated, and temporary islands would be quickly created. But if any one spot be watched, all these separate projections would be seen soon to join and the wider sinuses to be swept along until the whole area in question was completely consumed and the same scene of operations transferred to a point far in advance where the same process was being repeated, and so on indefinitely. The whole country behind these rapidly advancing scenes would be black, the devouring flames not being prevented by any of their erratic performances from ultimately compassing their design. We thus have a kinetographic representation, as it were, of the general method of nature in the march of evolution, the difference between this and the previous illustration being that while this goes on before the eyes almost more rapidly than it can be described, the other is a slow secular process that cannot be observed in operation, but can only be interpreted by the geologist from the facts that he can see and recognize as having themselves recorded their own history.

The progress of discovery, of science, and of knowledge and truth in the world generally, follows this same method, whatever department we may examine. The effect of it is to give the impression during the early stages in the history of any science, that all is chaos, and that no real progress is being made. Every one is making claims for his own results and denying those of all others, so that the mere looker-on and the public at large are led to doubt that anything is being accomplished. They see only the main land of established truth and deny that the sea bottom is rising and that the promontories and islands are being united to the continent. Like the Indians of the Pacific slope who admitted that the grass grew, but denied that the great Sequoias had ever been other than they are, the world perceives the movement of events on the surface of society—political, economic, industrial—but deities that there is great social movement which is becoming slowly crystallized into science.

Just at present we are in that initial stage in sociology, in which a great army of really honest and earnest workers is wholly without organization—an army, it might be called, all the members of which are officers having the same rank, and none subject to the commands of any other. Each one is pursuing the one particular line that he has chosen. Nearly every one has some one single thought which he believes to embrace, when seen as he sees it, the whole field of sociology, and he is elaborating that idea to the utmost. Now, it is clear that he will make much more of that idea than any one else could make. He will get all the truth out of it that it contains. It is true that he will carry it too far and weight it down with implications that it will not bear; but these are, like the errors of all scientific investigators, subject to universal criticism and ultimate rejection by putting the real truth in their place.

The notion has always been prevalent that men of one idea are useless or worse than useless. The fact is that they are the most useful of all men. I do not refer to such as are afflicted with the pathological idée fixe, but to those who are, as it were, possessed and consumed by some single thought, some favorite hypothesis, some heuristic conception, which grows larger and more all-comprehensive, until it impels them to pursue it untiringly to its last logical conclusion and to work into it great fields of truth that no name that can be given it would even suggest to any one else. Work done under such an inspiration is thoroughly done. The analysis is exhaustive, and it never fails, notwithstanding the necessary error and exaggeration, to constitute a substantial contribution to the general stock of human knowledge and to the true progress of science.

SYSTEMS OF SOCIOLOGY

All sciences pass through a long analytic period before reaching the synthetic stage. Sociology is still in its analytic period. There is even a disposition to condemn all attempts at synthesis. No one will recognize anything done by others. There is a spirit of intense individualism. There is no disposition to appropriate the truth that is being produced. The ideas that are put forth seem to have no affinity for one another. On the contrary they are mutually repellent. There is little real controversy because every one regards all other ideas as quite unworthy of attention. There is therefore no discussion, and the necessary prelude to coordination is discussion.

When different writers shall begin to discuss one another’s ideas there will be some hope of an ultimate basis being found for agreement, however narrow that basis may be.

In this perfectly independent way a large number of what may be called systems of sociology are being built up, most of which are regarded by their authors as complete, and as superseding all other systems. Any attempt adequately to present all these systems to the reader would require a volume instead of a chapter. This has, however, already been done in great part and ably by Professor Paul Barth⁠* in the introduction to a work whose title indicates that he has himself a system, but who differs from most of his contemporaries in not only respecting but also in understanding other systems.

I also undertook an enumeration of the principal systems of sociology from my own special point of view, which was originally intended to be embodied in this chapter, but the treatment of a dozen of these, brief though it had to be, attained so great volume that I decided to publish it separately⁠ ¹ and content myself with this reference to it, should any desire to consult it. This I can do the better as the present work cannot be historical, and as there is certainly enough to be said in illustration of my own system without devoting space to the consideration of those of others. But each of these twelve leading sociological conceptions or unitary principles has been put forward with large claims to being in and of itself the science of sociology. The ones selected for treatment in the papers referred to were considered as embodying in each case the idea entertained by the principal defender or expounder of the principle, or by the group of persons advocating it and thus constituting in each case a sort of school, of what constitutes the science.

The principles were therefore preceded by the expression Sociology as in analogy to Professor Barth’s title: Sociology as the Philosophy of History. Thus designated, these unitary principles, forming the basis of so many systems or schools of sociology, were the following:—

Sociology as:—

I. Philanthropy.

II. Anthropology.

III. Biology (the organic theory).

IV. Political Economy.

V. Philosophy of History.

VI. The Special Social Sciences.

VII. The Description of Social Facts.

VIII. Association.

IX. The Division of Labor.

X. Imitation.

XI. Unconscious Social Constraint.

XII. The Struggle of Races.

There are of course others, but these may be taken at least as typical examples if not as the principal ones now confronting the student of sociology. Any one of these views might be, and most of them have been, set forth, in such a form that, considered alone, it would seem to justify the claim set up. This enumeration is calculated to afford to the unbiased mind something like an adequate conception of the scope of sociology, for no single one of these conceptions is to be rejected. All are legitimate parts of the science, and there are many more equally weighty that remain as yet more or less unperceived. A comprehensive view of them will also illustrate the law set forth at the beginning of this chapter relating to the manner in which not only social science but all science advances. To change the figure there used, all these various lines, together with all others that have been or shall be followed out, may be compared to so many minor streams, all tending in a given direction and converging so is ultimately to unite in one great river that represents the whole science of sociology as it will be finally established.

* Die Philosophie der Geschichte als Sociologie. Erster Theil: Einleitung und kritische Uebersicht, Leipzig, 1897.

1 Contemporary Sociology. American Journal of Sociology , Vol. VII, Chicago, 1902, No. 4, January, pp. 475-500; No. 5, March, pp. 629-658; No. 6, May, pp. 749-762. Reprinted as brochure, Chicago, 1902, pp. 70.

3

THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF SOCIOLOGY

The reader will probably say, after reading this chapter, that I have added another to the dozen systems of sociology enumerated in Chapter II. I shall not demur to this. But he will remember that I have not disparaged the multiplications of systems, provided they are based on a real idea. It is the only way in which the science can advance, and the more ideas thus exhaustively worked out, the broader and richer the science will become. The conceptions thus marshaled are sufficiently dissimilar and varied, but I think it will be admitted that the additional one now to be set forth is different still from any of them, and as unlike them as they are unlike one another.

My thesis is that the subject-matter of sociology is human achievement. It is not what men are, but what they do. It is not the structure, but the function. Sociologists are nearly all working in the department of social anatomy, when they should turn their attention to social physiology. Most of them have imbibed the false notion that physiology is dynamic, and is in some way connected with social progress. They scarcely dare inquire what social physiology is, for fear that it may involve them in questions of social reform. But physiology is merely function. It is what structures and organs do, what they were made to do, the only purpose they have. Structures and organs are only means. Function is the end. It is therefore easy to see how much more important physiology is than anatomy. The latter is, of course, a necessary study, since functions cannot be performed without organs; but it is in the nature of preparation, and can be relegated to one or other of the special social sciences, which, as I have shown, supply the data for the study of sociology. The principal sources of such data are history, demography, anthropology, psychology, biology, civics, and economics; but all the sciences contribute to that highest science, social physiology.

To be less technical, but really repeat the same thing, sociology is concerned with social activities. It is a study of action, i.e., of phenomena. It is not a descriptive science in the naturalist’s sense—a science that describes objects looked upon as finished products. It is rather a study of how the various social products have been created. These products once formed become permanent. They are never lost. They may be slowly modified and perfected, but they constitute the basis for new products, and so on indefinitely. Viewed from the evolutionary standpoint, the highest types of men stand on an elevated platform which man and nature working together have erected in the long course of ages. This is not only true of our time, but it has been true of all times. The most advanced of any age stand on the shoulders, as it were, of those of the preceding age; only with each succeeding age the platform is raised a degree higher. The platforms of previous ages become the steps in the great staircase of civilization, and these steps remain unmoved, and are perpetuated by human history.

Or, to change the figure, the human polyp is perpetually building a coral reef, on the upper surface of which the last generation lives and builds. The generations live and die, but they leave behind them the result of all that they accomplished when living. This result is a permanent part of the great ocean bed of human achievement. As time goes on these successive additions, superimposed the one upon the other, form the bed-rock of civilization. They become lithified, as it were, and constitute the strata of the psychozoic age of the world, through which the true historian, like the geologist, cuts his sections and lays bare in profile the successive stages of human culture.

It is this fact of permanent human achievement that makes the broad distinction between animal and human societies. Just as there is a radical difference between cosmic and organic evolution,⁠* so there is a radical difference between organic and social evolution. The formula that expresses this distinction the most clearly is that the environment transforms the animal, while man transforms the environment. Now it is exactly this transformation of the environment that constitutes achievement. The animal achieves nothing. The organic world is passive. It is acted upon by the environment and adapted to it. And although it is true that in the structural modifications that constitute such adaptation the efforts and activities of the organism play a prominent part, still even this is only a reflex response to the pressure from without, and really constitutes a part of the environment. Man, on the contrary, as a psychically developed being, and in increasing degrees in proportion to his psychic development, is active and assumes the initiative, molding nature to his own use.

There has been no important organic change in man during the historic period. The trifling physical differences which we attribute to differences of environment acting on man during a century or two, would have no diagnostic value in biology. He is no more fleet of foot, keen of vision, or strong in muscle and tendon than he was when Herodotus wrote. Yet his power of vision has been enormously increased by all the applications of the lens, his power of locomotion has been multiplied by the invention of propelling machines, and his strength has become almost unlimited by calling the forces of nature to his assistance. Tools are vastly more effective than teeth or claws. The telescope and the microscope completely dwarf all natural organs of sight. Railroads are fair substitutes for wings, and steamships for fins. In the electric transmission of thought across continents and seas he has developed an organ of which no animal possesses a rudiment. Yet all this is less practically useful than the increased means of production that have resulted from a long series of inventions. It is all the result of man’s power to transform the environment. The artificial modification of natural phenomena is the great characteristic fact in human activity. It is what constitutes achievement. No animal is capable of it. Some superficial observers seem to see in the nests of birds, the dams of beavers, the honeycomb of bees, and the various more or less complicated habitations of certain rodents and other animals, an analogy to the achievements of man. But these all lack the essential element of permanence. They cannot be called artificial, and it is their artificial character that distinguishes the results of human activity. The principle here involved will be dealt with in Chapter XVII.

It is necessary to inquire here what in reality constitutes civilization. We have not in the English language the same distinction between civilization and culture that exists in the German language. Certain ethnologists affect to make the distinction, but they are not understood by the public. The German expression Kulturgeschichte is nearly equivalent to the English expression history of civilization. Yet they are not synonymous, since the German term is confined to the material conditions, while the English expression may and usually does include psychic, moral, and spiritual phenomena. To translate the German Kultur we are obliged to say material civilization. Culture in English has come to mean something entirely different, corresponding to the humanities. But Kultur also relates to the arts of savages and barbaric peoples, which are not included in any use of civilization, since that term in itself denotes a stage of advancement higher than savagery or barbarism. These stages are even popularly known as stages of culture, where the word culture becomes nearly synonymous with the German Kultur.

To repeat again the definition that I formulated twenty years ago: material civilization consists in the utilization of the materials and forces of nature. It is, however, becoming more and more apparent that the spiritual part of civilization is at least conditioned upon material civilization. It does not derogate from its worth to admit that without a material basis it cannot exist. But it is also true that the moment such a basis is supplied, it comes forth in all ages and races of men. It may therefore be regarded as innate in man and potential everywhere, but a flower so delicate that it can only bloom in the rich soil of material prosperity. As such it does not need to be specially fostered. No amount of care devoted to it alone could make it flourish in the absence of suitable conditions, and with such conditions it requires no special attention. It may therefore be dismissed from our considerations, and our interest may be centered in the question of material civilization, and this will be understood without the use of the adjective.

As examples of the forces that are utilized in civilization, stated in something like the historical order of their use, may be mentioned heat, light, gravitation, wind, water, steam, and electricity. The value of water as a power is in its weight, so that this is only one of the many applications of gravitation. More difficult to class, but perhaps earlier than any other, is the power of inertia in ponderable matter by which, even in the club, it is made to increase the efficiency of the unaided hands. Still more subtle, but immensely effective, is the use of the principle of the lever and fulcrum, by which effects are rendered vastly greater than the muscular force exerted. These are only a few of the most obvious of nature’s powers which man learned to profit by. Of materials or substances, the simplest were wood, clay, stone, and the metals as fast as means were discovered of separating them from their ores. The reason why bronze (copper) antedates iron is that it more frequently occurs in a pure state, for it is much less abundant. Aluminum, perhaps the most abundant of all metals, was among the last to be utilized, solely because so difficult to obtain in a pure state. After these came the multitudinous chemical substances, elementary and composite, that are now applied to innumerable uses.

The distinction, however, between materials and forces disappears entirely upon analysis. It is no longer metaphysical to say that we know nothing of matter except through its properties. It is only its reactions that affect man’s senses, only its properties that are utilized. But no line of demarcation can be drawn between the properties of matter and physical forces. Properties are forces and forces are properties. At bottom, it is simply activities with which we have to do. It is now known that all matter is active, and the only difference between substances is the different ways in which they act. Of course these differences in activity are due to corresponding differences in constitution, but this need not concern us. But if matter is only known by its properties, and the properties of matter are forces, it follows that matter possesses inherent powers. Schopenhauer was right when he said: Die Materie ist durch und durch Causalität.⁠* Matter is causality. Matter is power. Saint Simon had this idea in his apotheosis of industry and the importance of devoting energy to material things, Guyot has attempted to reduce it to a simple formula. In his Principles of Social Economy he expresses it in the following form: Economic progress is in direct ratio to the action of man on things.⁠*

In an article of later date he expanded and completed his formula as follows:—

Progress is in direct ratio to the action of man on things, and in inverse ratio to the coercive action of man on man.⁠*

Matter is dynamic, and every time that man has touched it with the wand of reason it has responded by satisfying a want. This is the true philosophical basis of that historical materialism of which we hear so much in these days. Its defenders dimly perceive the principle, but are unable to formulate it, being engrossed by surface considerations. It is this, too, that is meant when it is asserted that material civilization tends in the long run to ameliorate the condition of man. This is denied by some, but most men, I think, feel that it is so, although they might not know how to demonstrate it.

Civilization may be regarded either as an unconscious or as a conscious process, according to the point of view. The efforts and activities that have raised man from round to round of the ladder may be looked upon as the results of the inherent forces of his nature, and hence unconscious and cosmic. Or, the civilizing acts of men may be looked upon as the results of will, ideas, and intelligent aspirations for excellence, and hence conscious and personal. The first of these view-points has been erected into a science, and is sometimes appropriately called mesology. Human history thus becomes a simple extension of natural history. This is regarded as the scientific view par excellence. It is, however, mainly true that man has risen by dint of his own efforts and activities. The nature of human progress has been the theme of much discussion, and the extreme scientific view seems to negative not only all praise or blame but all hope of success on the part of man himself in trying to accelerate his advancement or improve his condition. The very law of evolution threatens to destroy hope and paralyze effort. Science applied to man becomes a gospel of inaction. But whether we are hero-worshipers or believers in the blind forces of evolution, we must admit that the truly great are the necessary instruments by which human progress is accomplished, and such progress without their intervention is inconceivable. But we are told that these human instruments of progress are themselves products of antecedent causes which could result in nothing else. Ergo, laissez faire.

The fallacy of this reasoning has been hard to point out. I have finally satisfied myself that it belongs to the class of fool’s puzzles, like Zeno’s proof of the impossibility of motion, or the feat of the woman of Ephesus who carried her calf each day from the time of its birth till it became an ox. I have frequently stated the problem in my own way, usually giving the argument the name of the gospel of action, and Professor Huxley, a short time before his death, seems to have caught a glimpse of the principle.⁠* But perhaps the best statement of the case that has yet been made is that of Mr. John Morley in his essay on Compromise. He says:—

It would be odd if the theory which makes progress depend on modification, forbade us to attempt to modify. When it is said that the various successive changes in thought and institution present and consummate themselves spontaneously, no one means by spontaneity that they come to pass independently of human effort and volition. On the contrary, this energy of the members of society is one of the spontaneous elements. It is quite as indispensable as any other of them, if, indeed, it be not more so. Progress depends upon tendencies and forces in a community. But of these tendencies and forces the organs and representatives must plainly be found among the men and women of the community, and cannot possibly be found anywhere else. Progress is not automatic, in the sense that if we were all to be cast into a deep slumber for the space of a generation, we should arouse to find ourselves in a greatly improved social state. The world only grows better, even in the moderate degree in which it does grow better, because people wish that it should, and take the right steps to make it better. Evolution is not a force, but a process; not a cause, but a law. It explains the source and marks the immovable limitations of social energy. But social energy can never be superseded either by evolution or by anything else.⁠*

It is human activity that transforms the environment in the interest of man. It is that interest⁠* which is in the nature of a force, and which in fact constitutes the social forces, that has accomplished everything in the social world. It is the social homologue of the universal nisus of nature, the primordial cosmic force (Urkraft) which produces all change. It is, to use a modern phrase, unilateral, and hence we find that the activities which have resulted in human achievement have, when broadly viewed, an orderly method and a uniform course. Just as the biotic form of this universal force pushes life into every crack and cranny, into the frozen tundras and the abysmal depths of the sea, so the generalized social energy of human interest rears everywhere social structures that are the same in all ages and races so far as concerns their essential nature.

But it is time to inquire more specially what the products of achievement are. The chief failure to understand them is due to the false and superficial view that they consist in material goods, or wealth. This is the fallacy upon which chiefly rests the notion that human society differs from animal society only in degree. Because welfare is so largely dependent on wealth, it is natural to suppose that wealth is the main condition to progress. There is a sense in which this is true, but to say that wealth is a product of achievement involves an ellipsis. Material goods, as, for example, food, clothing, and shelter, are, it is true, the ends; but the real products of achievement are means. They are the means to these ends, and not the ends themselves. Involved in the idea of achievement is that of permanence. Nothing that is not permanent can be said to have been achieved, at least in the sense in which that term is here employed. Now, material goods are all perishable. Nothing is better understood by economists than the instability of wealth. Says John Stuart Mill:—

When men talk of the ancient wealth of a country, of riches inherited from ancestors, and similar expressions, the idea suggested is, that the riches so transmitted were produced long ago, at the time when they are said to have been first acquired, and that no portion of the capital of a country was produced this year, except as much as may have been this year added to the total amount. The fact is far otherwise. The greater part, in value, of the wealth now existing in England has been produced by human hands within the last twelve months. A very small proportion indeed of that large aggregate was in existence ten years ago;—of the present productive capital of the country scarcely any part, except farm-houses and factories, and a few ships and machines; and even these would not in most cases have survived so long, if fresh labor had not been employed within that period in putting them in repair. The land subsists, and the land is almost the only thing that subsists. Everything which is produced perishes, and most things very quickly... Capital is kept in existence from age to age, not by preservation, but by perpetual reproduction.⁠*

Mr. Henry George in his Progress and Poverty, Chapter IV, has further discussed this subject. Most goods of course are consumed at once. These are the most important of all. The real end is consumption, and goods have no value except in consumption. But there are great differences in the degree of perishability of goods corresponding to the different kinds of consumption. A brown stone front on Fifth Avenue requires several generations of occupants to consume it, but if not constantly kept in repair it would soon crumble into ruins, and even the stones that face its front would be ultimately buried under accumulations of dust. Wonder is sometimes expressed at the discovery of ruined cities, such as Nineveh, Babylon, Troy, etc., deeply buried under the earth, and it is supposed that it is because the sands of the desert of that region have rapidly entombed them. But in Rome and other ancient cities not in desert regions excavations reveal buildings underneath the sites of the present ones. In the exceptionally clean city of Washington the official files and records stored away in the archives of fireproof buildings are covered with a thick coating of dust in a few years. The deposition of dust in the United States National Museum seems to be about at the rate of one millimeter per annum. It would be many times that out-of-doors, and the National Capital would become a buried Nineveh in a few centuries, if abandoned by man.

Wagons, carriages, and other vehicles only last their owners a certain length of time. Locomotives and railroad rolling stock last only so long, and must be replaced by new, however thoroughly they may be kept in repair. A steamship has a duration of life that is more nearly a fixed quantity than that of a man or an animal, and its mortality is just as certain. It makes very little difference either whether these things are kept in use or not. They disintegrate even more rapidly if lying idle. Machinery rusts and timbers rot more rapidly if always lying in one position than if kept moving. Houses go to pieces faster if unoccupied than if inhabited. Clothing would probably last longer unworn if kept away from moths and moisture than if worn, but sometimes even this does not seem true. I once talked with an aged colored man at the Soldier’s Home near Washington, who had been the body servant of General Winfield Scott, and who, since the death of the general, had been assigned the duty of caring for his effects in a room where they were kept. Among these effects were his military clothes, his sashes, etc. The old man said with a sigh of loyal sadness that in spite of all his care they were going to pieces, and with a true touch of superstitious reverence he ascribed their rapid decay to the fact that their owner was no longer alive. But of course he forgot that if he had lived all that time it would probably have been necessary to renew them several times.

If achievement consisted in wealth, the objects of production would have grown more and more durable with the progress of civilization. The fact is precisely the reverse of this. Whatever class of objects we may examine, we find that the farther back we go the more solid and enduring the materials are of which they are constructed. This is perhaps the most strikingly exemplified in architecture. Compare the old with the new part of any city of Europe, or even of America. I once engaged a room in a house on Essex Street, Strand, of which the front door consisted of ponderous planks six inches thick. The enlightened host apologized for it, saying that it was a very old house. Without some such experience, the modern American law student can scarcely understand the phrase he finds in his Blackstone, that in English law a man’s house is his castle. The clap-boarded balloon frames of the Middle West are more like castles in the air. But any American who has seen Europe, even in the capacity of a tourist, knows that this case was no particular exception. Builders in European cities have unlimited difficulty in trying to introduce into the older buildings such modern improvements as water and gas pipes, and electric wires. Such buildings were built to stay, and many of them are still very strong. But to see the perishability of even such structures it is only necessary to visit such castles and châteaus as those of Colchester or Chinon. But there has been a gradual change in the character of architecture, both public and private, in the direction of less and less solidity, durability, and costliness, from the pyramids of Egypt to the cottages of modern summer resorts.

Not less clearly is this tendency illustrated by the history of book-making since the invention of printing. Any one who has had occasion to handle books published in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, does not need to have this point further enforced. Often printed on parchment, always with strong, almost indestructible binding, firmly and securely hand sewed, not to speak of the elaborate ornamentation of the title page and rubrics at the heads of chapters, these ancient tomes are the embodiments of painstaking workmanship and durability. Contrast them with modern books. Four centuries hence there will scarcely exist a copy of a nineteenth-century book that anybody reads. Many an édition de luxe even will go to pieces on the shelves of public libraries.

But to these qualities of durability and expensiveness have succeeded those of ready reproduction and indefinite multiplication. These are the elements of diffusion and popularization. It is an evening up of conditions. For along with the massive structures, chiefly for tombs of dead rulers or temples to the gods, there went great deprivation, even in the means of shelter, for the living men of the time. So, too, in the early history of book-making, only the very few could afford to own a book. Only the cheap can become universal, and it is easier to renew a cheap article than to guard a costly one. The ages of stone and bronze and iron have successively passed, and we are living in an age of paper and caoutchouc.

Achievement does not consist in wealth. Wealth is fleeting and ephemeral. Achievement is permanent and eternal. And now mark the paradox. Wealth, the transient, is material; achievement, the enduring, is immaterial. The products of achievement are not material things at all. As said before, they are not ends but means. They are methods, ways, principles, devices, arts, systems, institutions. In a word, they are inventions. Achievement consists in invention in the Tardean sense. It is anything and everything that rises above mere imitation or repetition. Every such increment to civilization is a permanent gain, because it is imitated, repeated, perpetuated, and never lost. It is chiefly mental or psychical, but it may be physical in the sense of skill. The earlier developments of civilizing influences consisted mainly in these, and such accounts as we have consist in descriptions of the physical feats of heroes. But mere muscular strength soon yields to cunning and skill. These do not achieve until they begin to create. Language itself was an achievement of stupendous import, and every one of the steps it has taken—gesture, oral, written, printed forms of language—has marked an epoch in the progress of man. Literature has become one of the great achievements. Art, too, is an achievement upon which we need not dwell. Philosophy and science must be ranked as achievements, vast and far-reaching in their consequences. The invention of tools, instruments, utensils, missiles, traps, snares, and weapons comes under this head, crowned by the era of machinofacture, artificial locomotion, and electric intercommunication.

All these are too obvious and important to have escaped the observation of any one. But I wish to draw attention to a class of products of achievement that are at once typical, important, and little thought of in this connection. They may be called the tools of the mind. Lord Bacon saw the need of instruments or helps to the mind as tools are helps to the hand,⁠* but long before his day many such had been invented, and he had used them all his life, and many have been invented since. An arithmetical notation, or mode of expressing numbers by symbols of any kind, is such a tool of the mind, and all leading races have devised something of the kind. Greece had hers, and Rome hers. We still make some use of the latter. But these systems vary greatly in value and usefulness, according to their simplicity and flexibility. It is remarkable that the Greek mind, although so given to mathematics, did not furnish the world with a perfect method of writing numbers. The system that is now universally employed by civilized races is called the Arabic system, but it is probable that the Arabs only somewhat improved it after receiving it from the East. We are told, too, that, like most other things, it has a history and a genesis, but its origin is for the most part lost in obscurity. So far as the decimal system itself is concerned, some form of it (if not decimal, then by fives or twenties) is practically universal, for the simple reason that there are ten fingers on the two hands, and that the fingers (or fingers and toes) are universally used for counting. The origin of the Arabic symbols is a matter of speculation,⁠* but these would be evolved very much as were the letters of the alphabet. But the peculiar merit of the Arabic system consists in what is called the value of position,⁠* and this it is which gives it its wonderful adaptability to business uses. We need only to figure to ourselves the sorry plight the world would be in if obliged to depend for all the business transactions, engineering calculations, and pedagogic necessities upon, say, the Roman system of numerals, in order to form a just idea of the infinite value to society of the Arabic system. This illustrates, too, as well as any other case, what is mean by permanence. The goods whose cost, prices, and values it enables us so readily to calculate, may be produced, transported, exchanged, and consumed a thousand or a million times, but the means of computing all the elements of these processes remain forever, and may be used throughout all future time, as they have been used in the past. The Arabic system is a typical permanent human achievement.

In like manner we might review all the other kinds of calculus: algebra, which also goes back to India; logarithms, of relatively modern date; analytical geometry, invented by Descartes and now used by all statisticians, by political economists and sociologists; the differential and integral calculus, somewhat independently formulated by Newton, Leibnitz, and Lagrange, and without which astronomy and many other sciences and arts could never have reached their present state of development. These, too, are among the great permanent achievements of the race. The three great arts of reading, writing, and calculating, viewed from a philosophical standpoint, have raised that part of mankind who possess them high above all those races in which they are unknown, or only rudimentary. The unreflecting have little idea of the importance of these factors in giving superiority to the advanced races. I fully agree with Galton, Kidd, and others of their school, that the natural superiority of civilized races as compared with uncivilized ones is greatly exaggerated, and that it is almost wholly due to this vast mechanical equipment of acquired aptitudes, built up along one advancing line of social development, increment upon increment, permanently welded to these races so that they imagine that it is a part of themselves. Mr. Kidd very happily calls the power thus acquired social efficiency, a term that I gladly adopt and shall freely use. And I fully agree with him when, after illustrating this truth at considerable length, he concludes:—

The true lesson of this, and of the large class of similar experiences commonly supposed to prove the low mental development of uncivilized man, is not that he is so inferior to ourselves, intellectually, as to be almost on a level with Mr. Galton’s dog, but that he is almost always the representative of a race of low social efficiency with consequently no social history. On the other hand, the individuals of civilized races with whom he is contrasted are the members of a community with a long record of social stability and continuity, which is, therefore, in possession of a vast accumulated store of knowledge inherited from past generations. That is to say, we are the representatives of peoples necessarily possessing high social qualities, but not by any means and to the same degree these high intellectual qualities we so readily assume.⁠*

The industrial arts form a much more obvious, though perhaps not more important, class of human achievements. They are greatly dependent at every step on the tools of the mind, and, properly viewed, they are almost as completely psychic in their nature. For all art is due to invention, and invention is a mental operation. Every tool or implement of industry, however primitive and rude, has cost a large amount, in the aggregate, of thought, although it may be the product of a long series of slight improvements, distributing the mental energy through many different minds acting in different generations. Still it foots up the same quantity of thought applied to the invention. But the increment of improvement is at once materialized in the changed product, and the achievement is thus rendered permanent, and the basis for further improvement. Thought is thus dynamic when applied to matter. The new and better article, if used, will wear out, but the materialized idea lives on in the reproduction of the article as long as it serves its purpose. This part involves what is called labor. The inventor need not make a usable tool or machine at all. He may embody the idea in a model, or even in a drawing, and nowadays the state assumes the duty of registering and preserving these models, and protecting the inventor from having them copied by others who did not invent them.

But the simple reproduction of invented products is not purely physical or muscular. This point has latterly been insisted upon by