INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY. VI. PART III. GENERAL STRUCTURE OF SOCIETIES.
CHAPTER VI. Continued.
SECTION II. THE LIMITS OF STRUCTURE AND OF ORGANIC LIFE.
THE problem of the natural distribution of the human species is a sociological problem. Its data are related at once to the different environments and to the varieties of populations, to physical nature, and to man. Zoological biology in general rests upon the double consideration of the living being and its envi- ronment. The human species forms a part of this chain of living beings. It is therefore necessary to interpret the laws concern- ing the distribution of the human species over the earth, at first, entirely through biology.
In its metaphysico-positive transition the philosophy of his- tory, disdainful of humble realities, had ended in these latter times only in some contradictory absolutes, to every one of which each school exclusively attached its preferences, either to the environment or to the race. The race itself remained a vague expression. Indeed, it could be conceived of only as a variety of a single species. Thence recurred the problem of the origin of these races and of these varieties. If the race is a historic product, it can evidently disappear from history at a certain time in the same manner that it has appeared. In his Philosophic der Geschichte Lassaulx attempted to resolve the difficulty by saying that the human kind, in its corporeal and intellectual nature, is nothing else than the unity of the first man scattered into plu- ralities, and that the first man is nothing else than the plurality, still concealed in unity, of all those who shall proceed from him ! Lazarus Geiger, in Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte dcr Menschheit (Stutt- gart, 1871), applied this pretended universal law of the develop- ment of humanity, at once nature and mind, to the science of language. 1 This formula, in appearance conciliatory, was in
'Idem, De Vorigine et de Involution des langues. Stuttgart, 1862; 2 vols.
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