INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 663
the road followed thus far by us in the present study; to point out that all the forces and properties of nature considered alone or in their aggregates, are limited ; to show that there are climatic, geological, vegetable, and animal zones; to search for the laws of their distribution and their limitation ; to extend these researches to the human species in its adaptation to environment; to show that every organism has a structure and consequently a limit, and that its external activity is always correlated with its constitution and its external organization ; to try to prove that all social com- binations are limited, that these limits are not only military or political but sociological, that the latter may be different from the former, and that they both are removed coincidently in order that in the end there may remain only such limits as impose them- selves naturally in accord with the greatest social co-operation both from the point of view of numbers and extent what an aberration ! To study vegetable societies, animal societies, and the smaller societies which live in the midst of the great political societies, and whose laws are in reality the same as those of the great empires all this has seemed hitherto unworthy of or dis- tinct from profound science and philosophy.
The frontier is not only a territorial delimitation of the sover- eignty of a group represented or not by a chief ; this rudimentary conception was exact, in reality, only temporarily, and so long only as territorial ownership was one with sovereignty. In per- sistently maintaining this theory, applicable only to an isolated state, one loses the point of view that social frontiers are neither solely military, nor political, but that there are also economic, genetic, artistic, religious and scientific, moral and juridical fron- tiers. The structure of all these may or may not be military, and may or may not coincide with what we call the frontier of the political sovereignty, the frontier above all military, which sepa- rates sovereignties. The forces of a society or of a state are made up of all their forces, and all have not necessarily the same limits on the outside, any more than the same distribution within. The problem, is much more complex than has been supposed hitherto. This is not all ; the survival of ancient constitutions and of super- annuated beliefs in correspondence with the essentially military
