Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/278

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264 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

could be farther from the truth. I have yet to learn of a single spe- cialist in any branch of biology who has given it any degree of impor- tance. The heaviest blow that has ever been leveled against it came from that type and prince of biologists, Professor Huxley (Adminis- trative Nihilism). Both Darwin and Haeckel have recognized the true "analogy," but neither has laid great stress upon it. Mr. Spencer, although his Principles of Biology is certainly his masterpiece, makes no pretension to any specialty in biology, and might as well be called a psychologist or a chemist, but he is too good a biologist to swallow the doctrine in the large doses prescribed by the two authors now under consideration. The present writer has devoted the greater part of his life to two of the lesser but cognate branches of biology, and has made some excursions into certain of its wider fields, and while he fully acknowledges the existence of an analogy and yields to none in appreciating the inestimable value to sociology of biological prin- ciples, he is still decidedly of the opinion that more harm than good may come from the attempt to push such considerations farther than the strict limits of science and fact will warrant.

What then does it all amount to, and what is the real outcome of the whole discussion ? Simply this, that the laws of evolution are cos- mical in their sweep, and that whatever department of nature we look into we find them operating in the same way and bringing about the same results. We might as well say that organisms are planetary sys- tems because the laws of evolution are working the same in both. We could with equal propriety claim that language is an organism, for everyone knows what remarkable analogies occur between organic and linguistic phenomena. We find analogies everywhere, and they only seem to prove the identity of different spheres of cosmic action when we forget that the universe is under the dominion of one grand law ; but so soon as this is recognized, instead of wondering at the likenesses of things we learn rather to wonder at the diversities that nature presents.

There is no space left in which to deal with that mere corollary of the subject which is called social pathology. Both authors include it, only Senator Lilienfeld's work professes to be confined to this aspect. It is not so, but is really a summary of his great work, which M. Worms in his introduction to it says with some humor and much truth, could not be made so voluminous and discursive when written in the French language ! Social pathology as treated by both authors