INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY. 1
PART III. GENERAL STRUCTURE OF SOCIETIES.
CHAPTER I. PROLEGOMENA AND DEFINITIONS.
I.
IN the first volume of my Introduction to Sociology, published in 1886, I proceeded to the analysis and classification of the constitutive elements of societies ; in the second volume, published in 1889, I entered upon the study of the social organs and func- tions considered alone. It remains for us to study societies in their general structure and afterward in their general life or totality. Structure and life correspond to the terms statics and dynamics, applied especially to Auguste Comte. It will appear later why we prefer the former expressions to the latter.
Many years have elapsed between the present publication and the appearance of the two preceding volumes ; these years have been consecrated almost entirely to inductive researches. Some of the results of these researches have been published ; others have formed the subjects of uninterrupted lectures upon social economy and the history of social economy, which I have given at L'Universite Nouvelle de Bruxelles. During this period, now somewhat long, I have been constantly elaborating the present work, which, in conformity with the positive method, is therefore only the philosophical synthesis of my previous patient observations, resumes of which were given in the differ- ent lectures, numbering in all about twelve hundred, which I have delivered from 1889 to 1902. I expect to publish here- after those concrete data of my abstract sociology of which my works upon taxes, upon coal-mining, upon the representa- tive system, upon the evolution of beliefs and doctrines in the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Peru, Mexico, India, and China, upon commercial credit, upon money, upon credit and banks, etc., are fragments. I insist upon this point only in order to
'Translated by Robert Morris.
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