lOO THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
with potential capacity for humanization under appropriate con- ditions. All theories postulating the existence of natural rights enjoyed by man before he was united with his fellows in social and political relations collapse at once if Darwinism be valid. And yet, on this fundamental point of trenchant importance as regards system and terminology, sociology is distracted. On the one hand, Professor Franklin H. Giddings declares :
There is hardly a single fact in the whole range of sociological knowl- edge that does not support the conclusion that the race was social before it was human, and that its social qualities were the chief means of developing its human nature.
On the other hand, Professor Ward rejects the conclusions of Aristotle and Darwin, holding in express opposition to them both that man was not originally a social animal, but "that he was de- scended from an animal that was not even gregarious by instinct, and that human society .... is purely a product of his reason, and arose by insensible degrees, pari passu, with the development of his brain." No disagreement could be more radical than this. The Darwinists hold that socialization developed the human brain; the anti-Darwinists hold that the human brain developed socializa- tion. No wonder, then, that, lacking any base of operations, the movement is nothing more than desultory roving in all directions.
The unsystematic character of the movement accounts for its marked tendency to fall into errors, that might be avoided by re- course to established science. Sir Frederick Pollock, in his History of the Science of Politics, remarks that "after Burke it was impos- sible for anyone in England to set up the social contract again, either in Rousseau's or in Locke's form, for any effectual purpose." But sociologists in America do that very thing. Sociological dis- cussion of the nature of government reads like an ardent revival of Rousseau's political philosophy. Professor Ward, in his Dynamic Sociology (Vol. II, pp. 212 f.), argues that government was origi- nally a system of imposture:
It is evident that man in a supposed unrestrained state, in which none of his own race have the power to deprive him of any pleasure which he may seek, and be able to secure, would be far happier than in a condition where half of his desires which might otherwise be gratified are forbidden that gratification by the laws of government.
What is this but Rousseau's state of nature? If Darwin be right, in this "unrestrained state" we should not find men at all; perhaps
