Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/119

ADOLPHE COSTE, Lcs Principes d'une Socioloijic Objective. 105 between sociology and ideology is fundamental and may seern to need express justification. " There are," we are told, " two orders or classes of historical facts the one set of facts correlated with one another and with the growth of population ; the other set without any regular filiation or exact correlation with the condition of society, because they are due to the impulsive originality of great individuals." To the first order the author assigns the facts relating to govern- ment, to economic production, to religious belief, to social solidarity. To the other group he relegates " the fine arts, poetry, philosophy, pure science, sublime sentiments, heroic acts ". Utilitarianism marks the first group, idealism the second (pp. 5, 6, 235). The facts of the first group, moreover, are always special to a race or a nation and change with its changes. The facts of the second order are neither as special nor as variable ; they suit, more or less, all races and all countries (p. 7). Now there is clearly a distinction between (1) those actions, sentiments and ideas which are generally diffused through any particular society, and which are closely bound up with its cohesion as a society, and (2) on the other hand, the sporadic " bye-products" of exceptional individual brains. There is also a distinction between the actions, ideas, etc., which can be " imitated," or transmitted from one society to another, and those which cannot be assimilated by other societies at all, or not without undergoing serious modification A pro- position in Euclid, for instance, may be apprehended by an English school- boy of to-day exactly as it was apprehended by a Greek youth of two thousand years ago ; but even the most cultured student of antiquity can only partially, and by a great effort of imagination, put himself outside his own social and intellectual environment so as to read a Greek tragedy, or look at a Greek statue, in the emotional mood to which it originally appealed. M. Coste has given no sufficient justification of the particular line of demarcation which he draws. The painting, the poetry, the philosophy and even to some extent the science of a people are national products and correlated with the rest of the national life quite as much as the forms of religious belief, which may be borrowed by one people from another and, in the case of all the higher religions, are largely international in character. On the other hand mechanical inventions are "utili- tarian," and directly subserve "social interest"; as such they must be placed in M. Coste's first group (except in so far as they lead on to theoretical science). Yet they are individual in their origin almost as much (and as little) as the fine arts, and they are certainly more capable than the latter of being fully appreciated and imitated beyond the national frontiers. The distinction drawn by M. Goste seems (if a psychological explanation may be suggested) the outcome of his own special studies. He is a statistician, and he is therefore inclined to leave out of sociology what does not admit of quantitative measurement.