48 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 



philosophy, especially in the last. He shows how this is especially 

 characteristic of developed personality and how, in this respect, a 

 society is not like a low form of organic life but like the highest. 

 This process he terms social capitalization. 1 Society is further 

 like a personality in that it has consciousness, reason and will. 2 



Another important contribution for our purpose is his distinc- 

 tion between a normal and diseased organism. This concept he 

 applies by analogy to society and develops especially in his La 

 Pathologic Sociale. Disease may affect society in any one of the 

 three departments, industry, justice, or politics, and these 

 social maladies correspond to three forms of nervous disease, 

 that of industry to insanity, that of justice to delirium, that of 

 politics to paralysis. 3 This last, however, can hardly be called a 

 contribution to science of any kind. Ross scores Lilienfeld 

 severely for such flimsy analogical reasoning. 4 



The discussion of social pathology leads our author to the 

 question of social therapeutics which in places is equally fanciful 

 and unscientific. In bringing out this phase of group life he 

 introduces a note which finds little place in the systems of Comte 

 or Spencer. We have now the concept of social mal-adaptation 

 and the problem of adjustment. 



Another analogy used by Lilienfeld which has had large use 

 since, especially by pedagogical writers, is his bio-social law of 

 recapitulation taken over from Haeckel, according to which the 

 individual person recapitulates, in his development, the culture- 

 periods of racial history. 5 



The analogical method has been used too frequently as a device 

 to exploit some pet theory without painstaking endeavor to dis- 

 cover the forces at work in the process and formulate the laws of 

 their operation. This has been true to a considerable extent as 

 we shall have occasion to note later, with much of the reasoning 

 of the biological school of sociologists who are apt to assume 



1 Gedanken, pp. 55 f. 3 Earth, op. cit., pp. 103-105. 



2 Ibid., p. 61. 4 Foundations of Sociology, p. 48. 



6 Gedanken, i, pp. 245 f. " Die Stadien der menschlichen embryonalen Entwicke- 

 lung eines jeden Individuums entsprechen der progressiven socialen Entwickelung 

 des ganzen Menschengeschlechts in seiner stufenweisen Ausbildung in Verlaufe der 

 ganzen Geschichte der Menschheit " (ibid., p. 247). 



