We now have a new form of this doctrine of objectification, differing in nothing from the old forms, except that instead of humanity or society being called the only reality it is the state that is so regarded. The distinction between society and the state, however, is not clearly drawn, as may be seen from the following passage, which embodies the theory:

Instead of the genesis of society from individuals, what has taken place is the genesis of individuals from society; . . . . man did not make the state but the state made man . . . . it is an institution that existed before the human species was formed and was the instrument by which the human species was developed; . . . . the state includes society just as any entity includes all its parts.10

The author of this remarkable theory claims to be an orthodox Darwinian, and calls most sociologists anti-Darwinian, including those who are biological specialists and have sought to show the non-biological sociologists what Darwin really taught. It is a pity therefore that he could not have been contemporary with the great biologist in order to have told him how "species" were formed and developed, at least the "human species." That the "state" underlies the origin of species would certainly have been new to Darwin. That this "institution" is not confined to the "human species," but is of earlier animal origin, is, however, made clear in other passages, for example:

The state [which is here called a genus!], an integration that took place in the animal stock ancestral to the human species. All existing forms of the state have been evolved from primordial forms existing anterior to the formation of the human species. The state is the unit, of which all social structure and individual human existence are the differentiation. The state is a psychic unity and it is apprehensible only as it is objectified in institutions."

Now certain sociologists have proposed some highly metaphysical and even absurd theories, and have "objectified" humanity and society in ways that would have pleased a Scaliger, but none of them have ever approached this new doctrine as a specimen of mediaeval ontology. Yet its author is one of those who characterize sociology as a "pseudo-science" that has made a 10 Amer. Journ. Sociol., Vol. XV, September, 1909, D. 248.

Ibid., p. 255.

"false start." In his first attack upon it, published in a newspaper, and containing low appeals to popular prejudice, he simply repeated the old charges that have been so often made by the authors named at the beginning of this paper, and I was surprised that any answer was thought necessary. But the answer made him familiar with the face of the monster and lured him on to express his pity in a second attack, much subdued, in which at last he showed his colors, and advanced the astounding theory above stated. He has thus been good enough to tell the sociologists what they should have done and what a true "start" would have been. What might not sociology have been if it had only made this true start!

The comedy of all this lies in the fact that we now have a rational theory of the state. Morgan taught us in 1878 that political society supervened upon tribal society in Greece and Rome in the sixth century before Christ, and that it does not exist in most of the outlying races of men. Nothing that can be called a state exists in gentile society, and the state is a comparatively late factor in social evolution. Gumplowicz and Ratzenhofer have shown us just how the state arose as a consequence of race amalgamation. The ethnological and sociological proofs, although independently arrived at, harmonize completely and furnish us with the true natural history of the state. They teach us the origin in comparatively recent times of political society, states, and nations, as the result of prolonged struggles followed by periods of social and political equilibration and assimilation.

The state is the most important of all human institutions, and it is doubtless a recognition of this truth that has led to the innumerable attempts to explain its origin and nature. Some of the theories put forth may contain germs of truth, but the greater part of them are utterly worthless, as embodying no principle capable of explaining anything. Every writer imagined himself competent to formulate a theory of the state. I made bold to enter the lists in my initial work,12 which appeared in 1883. I was culpably ignorant of Morgan's great work published five 12 Dynamic Sociology, Vol. I, pp. 464-67; Vol. II, pp. 212 ff.

years earlier, and Gumplowicz's Rassenkampf appeared the same year as my own book. Of course I knew nothing of his pamphlet, Raçe und Staat, 1875, which contains a clear statement of the principle. My guess was perhaps as good as the average, but was wide of the mark, and in the light of the great Austrian theory and of the ethnological proofs I do not hesitate to repudiate it and remand it to the same limbo as all the rest.

I would not have mentioned this had not this new interpreter of the state singled it out (instead of quoting Pure Sociology, chap. x, published twenty years later) and held it up as my theory of the state. This procedure may be compared with that of the Spanish court-martial in condemning Ferrer at fifty for what he said at twenty. It would of course be useless to argue with one who resorts to such methods, and I wished only to show that of all the worthless theories of the state that have been set afloat the theory proposed by him is the most absurd. To it Tully's famous saying perfectly applies: Nescio quomodo, nihil tam absurde dici potest, quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum.

THE SOCIOLOGICAL STAGE IN THE EVOLUTION OF

THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

ALBION W. SMALL

The University of Chicago

For more years than we like to acknowledge, some of us have been saying that sociology is the fundamental human science. Others of us have preferred to say that sociology is the inclusive human science. Outside the ranks of sociologists there has been little evidence either of understanding these formulas or of will to understand them. Probably we have not always accurately interpreted one another's versions of these propositions, and possibly if we could begin over again from our present point of view we might find ways of expressing what we were groping after in an idiom that would grate less harshly on the ears of the unconvinced.

At all events I do not intend to unlimber those instruments of a warfare which now seems almost as ancient as it was honorable. I shall begin with the irenic assertion that whatever else may have been true or false about sociology, it was inevitable. Many acorns must feed swine and many more must rot on the ground, but those that strike root and survive are bound to become oaks. So thinking about human affairs has had to share the lot of all things mundane by yielding its wasteful toll of abortions and futilities. Given anywhere however the conditions for persistence, given freedom to evolve what is involved, given time to survey its previous course and to prospect the unexplored regions within its horizon, and thinking about human experience is as certain, in the fulness of time, to acquire the reach of sociology as the child to attain the stature of a man.

Whether or not we believe human reason capable of penetrating the sub- or the super-finite, all liberated minds are agreed that there is no stopping-place for our intelligence until we have applied our understanding with all its resources to everything that falls within the sweep of our conscious experience. Higher

ranges of mathematical problems will be undertaken as long as conceivable variations of quantitative relations remain unexplained. We shall enlarge the borders and rearrange the contents of our cosmologies as often as our processes of cosmic or atomic discovery bring new areas of greatness or littleness or complexness within our range of vision. Whether we shall arrive close to the goal or stop far from it, the mystery of life in the biological sense will be traced into every hiding-place which chemistry or physics in the service of physiology can penetrate; and whether we ever discover the origin of life or not, we shall never give up search for the connections between all the details which we can learn of its processes.

While these are truisms in connection with the physical world, we have not yet very generally recognized the equal certainty that the human mind will set no arbitrary limits to its inquiries in social connections. My assertion that sociology had to be is by no means a confession of ignorance that people are still declaring it can never be. Indeed my judgment is, that we have not yet passed the point at which denial of the right of suffrage to sociology grows obstinate in direct ratio with the increasing force of our argument. In fact the sociological yeast is an active ferment in all modern thinking about human affairs. Whether in religion or politics, in ethnology or economics, the men who are not merely threshing the empty straw of ancient categories, the men who are producing live thought-stuff, are doing it with the assistance of concepts and of processes that are essentially sociological. Among the theorists, however, generalizations of sociological concepts and processes, and claims that they are at least as valid as those of historiography or statistics, still affect the larger part of the scientific world as symptoms of mental aberration.

Twenty years ago this latter phase of the situation puzzled me. I had worked my way through the methodologies of the conventional social sciences, I had studied their briefs, so to speak, I had plotted the scope of their reasoning, but the more I thought over their programmes the more I was convinced that they had not exhausted the technique within our reach for inter