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SOCIOLOGY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY.
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which they present. The rational order of his studies is the following: It is necessary for him first to study the human groups one by one. In each of them he examines (following the terminology of the naturalists) in the first place the anatomy, in the second place the physiology. He observes the physical environment in which the society under consideration lives, the men who compose it, the race to which they belong, the groups (families, associations, cities) into which they are divided—in a word the anatomy of the social body. Passing to the physiology, the sociologist proposes the question—What phenomena take place in this society? The biologist distinguishes in the individual being a life of nutrition, a life of reproduction, a life of relation. Likewise, with the collective existence, the sociologist will distinguish a life of nutrition, precisely represented by economic phenomena; a life of reproduction, consisting of the genetic phenomena; and a life of relation, which gives birth to morality, art, religion and science.

Thus far, however, nothing has been examined but the life of individuals considered in their relations with each other. The life of the entire state as a whole, considered in itself, as an organism at once collective and individual, is superimposed upon these individual lives. This civic life is made up of political phenomena. As to juridical phenomena, they are, so to speak, only the crystallization of different orders of precedent phenomena, the common form which facts economic, moral, religious, political gradually receive, when, losing their primitive plasticity, they accommodate themselves to the rigid forms of written laws.

In brief, the study of these different orders of phenomena constitutes the physiology of a society. But when the sociologist has prosecuted this dual study, anatomical and physiological, for a given society, it is then necessary for him to do the same thing with all other societies. And when he has so surveyed them all, there remains the task of synthesizing the collected data. He must proceed from the anatomy and physiology of each society to the comparative anatomy and the comparative phys-