CHAPTER VIII 



THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIOLOGISTS 



TURNING from those who have emphasized the importance of 

 physical factors in social evolution, as Buckle, Ratzel and Ripley, 

 from those whose argument is based chiefly on a deductive appli- 

 cation of the neo-Darwinian formula of biological evolution, as 

 Nietzsche, Kidd, Galton, Pearson and Lapouge, from those, too, 

 whose interest has been largely philosophical or socio-psychical 

 and who have discussed some theoretical principles of funda- 

 mental importance to our subject as the organicists, we turn now 

 to some representative writers who have emphasized the necessity 

 of studying the process of social evolution inductively to find out 

 the laws and forces of social development. These writers differ 

 greatly among themselves as they are interested primarily in social 

 origins as the anthropologists, or in the whole process as the his- 

 torical school, or again in the forces now at work as the economists 

 and social psychologists. They differ also as they try to find some 

 one all-embracing law or principle corresponding to the law of 

 gravitation or posit a number of distinct laws and forces. A third 

 line of cleavage is as to whether the individual socius is made the 

 point of departure and society explained as some kind of combina- 

 tion of socii, or whether the group is taken as the unit. A fourth 

 distinction might be made according as they recognize a mutual 

 hatred and struggle as the chief characteristic of primitive or 

 " natural " man or sympathy and mutual aid; and here again a 

 strictly logical classification of writers is impossible for they over- 

 lap at so many points. 



The anthropological and historical schools have met with 

 especially great difficulties, as we noted in the discussion of 

 Spencer, because of the uncertainty connected with social origins. 1 

 With the discovery of relics of human ingenuity in geological 



1 Cf. Boas, Mind of Primitive Man, pp. 99, 182. 

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