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Demography 355
accumulation; so much so that history is as much the future as it is the past.
Certainly, for the living being, the present is not separated from the past, but he
wants to be also a creation of the future. This quality, in a rudimentary stage in
the case of primitive living beings, is definitely developed in the man who, no
longer prepared to undergo his existence, insists on building it up.
No doubt it would be as well to recall here what we were saying just now
about the evolution of inanimate matter and that of living matter. Essence and
existence are probably to be found in all phenomena. But it is with man that
the difference between ‘being’ and ‘existing’ takes on its full meaning, and that
alone gives research into the human sciences a special orientation of its own.
I I. Now, if it is true that every demographic event is a moment in a given life
and can only be understood when re-inserted in the totality of that life, it is
equally true that every such event is also subject to the influence of the condi-
tions of the time. For instance, the death of a person depends certainly on his
past life, but also on the sanitary conditions existing at the time of his decease.
If he goes through some area where an epidemic is raging, he runs a far greater
risk of dying than if he stays somewhere which is free from contagious disease.
It is for demographic analysis to disclose and gauge the influence of the condi-
tions prevailing at the time. Instantaneous behaviour then appears as the result
of two sets of factors: those which only have a meaning in terms of a specific
history, and those the existence of which is determined by the environmental
conditions prevailing. It is essential to draw a careful distinction between them,
for there is a great temptation to confuse the two. A lowering of the fertility
rate due, for instance, to an economic crisis does not necessarily mean any
lasting change in the behaviour of married couples. More often than not, their
desires will not have changed at all. They will merely be putting off the birth of
their children to a later date when the crisis has disappeared.
12. The variety of phenomena brought into play by demographic events gives
an all-embracing scientificcharacter to demographic research. Of all the human
sciences, demography is the one that can least afford to do without the other
sciences. We have already mentioned biology, sociology and psychology, but
other disciplines should be added: political economy inasmuch as the human
being is a producer during a part of his life and a consumer during the whole of
it; ethnology inasmuch as behaviour attitudes are determined by cultural fac-
tors; ecology inasmuch as man lives in the midst of nature and is therefore oblig-
ed to enter into a kind of symbiosis with her, and philosophy inasmuch as demo-
graphic events possess a clear ontological significance. Then there are mathe-
matics and statistics which provide demography with its analytical tools, and
technology which, through modifying the environment, gives rise to new types
of behaviour. Geography, medicine, history, law and criminology, theology,
ethics, political sciences, educational science - all these are brought into touch
at one time or another with demography. One can say that progress in any one
of these sciences has immediate bearings on demographic research.5 This close
link with all the sciences is brought out in the language, as witness the various