Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/134

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120 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

given to self -consciousness by contact with a different stage of develop- ment, whether higher or lower" Spencer's dictum, that increase of social mass is followed by greater differentiation and higher organization, can be adopted in the amended form suggested by Durkheim. "The division of labor varies directly as the size and density of society, and if it progresses continually in the course of social development, it is because societies become regularly denser and gen- erally larger." With the time-honored thesis that as the arts are perfected the state of society becomes less dependent on local conditions, may, perhaps, be joined Patten's law that as a race emerges from a local environment into a general environment a pain economy gives way to a pleasure economy.

Besides the agencies of social change the operation of which is recognized in the foregoing laws, there is the movement of the human intellect to be reckoned with. Ward's law that spon- taneous progress gives way to telic progress and individual telesis in turn yields relatively to collective telesis, expresses better even than Comte's famous formula the necessary course of intellectual evo- lution, because it is founded on the demonstrable tendency of an expanding intelligence to substitute the indirect method of obtaining ends for the direct method.

The most promising field for the discovery of valid laws is, however, the coexistence of social phenomena, rather than their succession. In social life, what goes with what? Which phe- nomena always occur together or never occur together ? Of these laws of coexistence the less ambitious relate to the mode of occurrence of phenomena. As examples of such laws of man- ifestation may be cited Giddings's proposition that "Impulsive social action tends to extend and intensify in a geometrical progres- sion" and Tarde's thesis that imitations proceed from the reputed superior to the reputed inferior.

Other correlations are expressed in laws of repugnance . Thus Ward announces that the less a type is specialized the more likely it is to persist. Tarde asserts that where custom-imitation is strong, mode -imitation is weak, and vice versa. Durkheim concludes that suicide of the egoistic type "varies inversely with the degree of integra- tion of the social group to which the individual belongs." Gid dings