COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



ing chapter I shall proceed to do this. I shall 

 show, first, that social evolution consists in the 

 integration of human families or tribal commu- 

 nities into larger and larger groups, which be- 

 come ever more heterogeneous and more inter- 

 dependent ; and secondly, that what we call 

 civilization consists in the ever increasing de- 

 finiteness and complexity of the correspondence 

 between the community and the environment. 

 Thirdly, I shall carry on the inquiry to a point 

 somew^hat in advance of Mr. Spencer's expo- 

 sition as it now stands, and show how these 

 truths must be supplemented in order to give 

 us a law of social evolution which shall cover 

 social phenomena simply, excluding the more 

 general phenomena of organic life. 



But while under ordinary circumstances it 

 might be well enough to proceed directly to 

 such an investigation, since there is no better 

 way of proving that certain groups of pheno- 

 mena conform to law than by pointing out the 

 law to which they conform, nevertheless in the 

 present case I think it desirable to preface the 

 inquiry with a brief discussion of one or two 

 logical and psychological truths — truths of 

 method and of doctrine — which lie at the basis 

 of sociology. In our survey of the simpler sci- 

 ences, no such preface was called for. In be- 

 ginning to treat of biological truths, we did not 

 deem it necessary to prove that waste and re- 

 242 



