Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/160

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148 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

they have attained ; i. e., according to their nervous organization. 5 Schaffle emphasized functional analogies rather than structural correspondences, and made much of the integration of social activities in a complex common life. 6 Worms has carried the biological analogy almost to the point of asserting an identity. 7 Beneath all these variations in emphasis, underlying a mass of commonplace, fanciful, and even grotesque parallelisms, one dis- covers always the fundamental idea of social unity, structural and functional. If the biological sociologists have not always seen society steadily, they have at least tried to see it whole.

The so-called classificationalists who, following Comte's example, have sought to solve the problems of sociology by classifying social phenomena into hierarchical orders, have also contributed to the idea of social unity. Thus Littre discovers four social systems which appear in this order : economic, political, artistic, and scientific. 8 DeGreef increases the number to seven; 9 LaCombe, with his theory of urgency in human motives, arranges these in an order practically the same as DeGreef s. 10 Others still have made classifications, although not of the hierarchical kind. A. Wagner classifies human motives under five heads, 11 while Small discovers six typical demands for satisfaction demands which work themselves out into social activities and institutions. 12 It is to be noted that all these classifications, whether of phenomena, systems x or motives, assume a society which is unified by the dependence and interrelations of the analyzed elements.

With the shifting of emphasis from the biological to the psychological analogy this theory of the social whole has been inevitably modified. Division of labor and interdependence have yielded more and more to the idea of a unity in habit, feeling,

  • FouiLLiE, La science sociale conlcmporaine (Paris, 1878), pp. 161-68.

SCHAFFLE, Bau und Leben des socialen Korpers, ad ed. (Tubingen, 1896). T WORMS, Organisme et socittl (Paris, 1896), pp. 42 f.

LITTRE, La science au point de vue philosophiquc (Paris, 1873), pp. 367, 368.

  • DEGREEF, Introduction a la sociologie, Vol. I, pp. 46-65.
  • LACOMBE, De Fhistoire considcrcc comme science, pp. 69 f.

11 WAGNER, Grundltgung der politischen Ockonomie, 3d ed., pp. 83 f. "SMALL AND VINCENT, An Introduction to the Study of Society, pp. 175 f.