3658925934

certain fruitfulness? I believe it was simply a deceptive last resource, a life-saving but rotten branch
clung to by those who believed it was impossible to bridge the gap between nature and history
without it. It must therefore disappear as soon as some other conception appears which is able, as it
were, to naturalize humanity. Social science was established not by comparing societies to organisms,
but by comparing them to each other from their many linguistic, religious, political aspects. At the last
International Sociological Congress, which took place in Paris in July 1897, this question was treated
in depth and ended with the complete rout of the social organism. No one was able to show a single
advance in social science stimulated by this way of thinking, and it is easy to see the errors in social
science that it introduced or suggested: the tendency to empty rhetoric, to substitute entities for
realities, such as “the soul of crowds”; the need to subject social development to a single tyrannical
series of phases comparable to the embryonic series; finally the lack of intelligence about the most
truly social sides of societies, language and religion, for which there are no analogues in the organic
being—hence the tendency either to belittle them or to eliminate them from sociology altogether. Thus
we may explain the somewhat scornful protest of the racial historians, even the philosophical ones,
against the new science presented to them in this guise.
Let us therefore consider this so-called theory as no more than an abortive attempt, an unsuccessful
attempt at classification. At the very most, one may grant Mr. Espinas that, the social organism aside,
there is still room for a certain social vitalism, or rather for a certain national realism, and that the
reality of “social life” is not in doubt. To be sure, but the problem is its meaning; is not this “social
life” only a resultant of individual lives related socially, or is it something else? In the first sense it is
only a poetic expression; in the second, a mystical idea.
Auguste Comte set forth a law concerning the hierarchy of sciences which, if it were true without
exception, would fully justify the support sociology asks of biology. In his view, all the sciences from
arithmetic to social science, passing via mechanics, physics, chemistry, and the science of living
things, are ranked by the decreasing simplicity and generality of their subjects, the lowest ranks
having the simplest and most general subjects. It follows that each science must lean on the one
immediately below it, and not vice versa, since the lower science studies those elementary realities
whose more complex groupings are encompassed by the higher one. For example, a knowledge of
chemistry is indispensable to the physiologist, whereas the chemist, even one concerned with organic
substances, can do without a knowledge of natural history. Now all this is true, but on one condition:
that the successive realities—the subjects of the successive sciences—be superimposed like
geological formations of which the highest is most recent and could have been formed only through a
transformation or a combination of lower preceding layers. Let us suppose, however, that at a certain
level of this scientific stratification there appear entirely new facts comparable to the hot springs of
high mountains, which, cutting through all the lower layers, rise up from beneath even the lowest solid
layer of earth. And grant that the appearance of consciousness, of the self, on the highest levels of the
living world is a marvelous spring of this sort: can the science concerned with this phenomenon,
which is not reducible to surrounding or preceding ones and is, though the highest, only conditioned
but not engendered by them, can this science be regarded as having a more complex and more special
subject than all the others? On the contrary, it may be highly probable that, revealing a hidden reality,
perhaps the simplest and most lofty of all sciences, psychology, has more to teach its lower sisters
than vice versa. And this would also be the case for sociology if there were any reason to think that
the social phenomenon—which is essentially psychological—is itself more general than it seems.
Are there not, in fact, some rather specious reasons for this view? Was it not by assimilating
organisms to society and not society to organisms that the clearest (or least obscure) light was thrown