SOCIETAL EVOLUTION I5I 



Naturally the question as to what brings about the cohe- 

 sion of the individuals is far from being as easily answered in 

 human as in animal societies. To this question, which also 

 involves the causes of the maintenance or continuation as 

 well as the origin of human societies, the philosophers and 

 sociologists of the past have given a number of different 

 answers. These are all hypothetical, and none of them is 

 altogether satisfactory. Several of them, in fact, are quite 

 inadequate and at present obsolete, but it may be of interest 

 to consider them seriatim. 



1. The earliest hypothesis, if it deserves so dignified 

 a name, is, of course, that of Genesis, according to which the 

 male of our species was made out of clay by divine fiat on the 

 sixth day and the female from his rib by the same process 

 somewhat later. This statement has some extraordinary 

 implications, only two of which need be mentioned. First, 

 man having been created complete, he was necessarily a 

 social being from the beginning, and inquiry into the causes 

 of society must be useless. Secondly, owing to his special 

 creation, man is definitively set over against the other 

 animals and Nature in general. This is the view still taken 

 for granted by many theologians so that for them all inquiry 

 into social evolution and cohesion in a biological sense must 

 be meaningless. 



2. Some of the Greek philosophers, including Plato, 

 entertained a similar supernatural view of the origin of man 

 and his society, mainly on ethical grounds. But Plato seems 

 also to have been inclined to regard society as having had a 

 natural origin and growth and this view was definitively 

 developed by Aristotle and much later by other philosophers, 

 including de Maistre and Kant. 



3. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries an hypoth- 

 esis of the origin of human society was expounded by 

 Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, which seems very strange to 

 us. These philosophers imagined that men had formed and 

 continued to maintain their society by mutual agreement, 

 or compact. That anything like society could owe its begin- 

 ning and cohesion to such frail intellectual motives was 

 quite in harmony with the thinking of those centuries. 

 Of course, the corollary that men might dissolve by intellec- 



