Direct Bond of Causality 137 



man has waged war almost constantly. At the 

 same time he has passed from savagery to civiliza- 

 tion." But if one proceeds to affirm that since 

 these two facts are parallel and simultaneous, one 

 is the cause of the other, the logical deduction 

 cannot withstand the first test of criticism. The 

 reasoning has no power behind it. If only 

 parallelism and simultaneousness are given in 

 explanation, we are quite as well justified in con- 

 cluding that civilization has progressed in spite 

 of war as on account of war. In order that cer- 

 tain effects may be attributed to a certain cause, 

 simultaneousness alone does not suffice in science. 

 The direct bond of causality must be established. 

 The doctrine that war is the cause of civilization 

 corresponds to the cataclysmic theory in geology 

 before that subject became a science. As long as 

 the geologists believed in the theory of universal 

 cataclysm and special creation, the subject was 

 veiled in a haze of metaphysics and contradictory 

 hypotheses. Geology became a positive science 

 only when the theory of slow and actual causes 

 was adopted. The influence of earthquakes and 

 cataclysms in shaping the earth's crust is, of course, 

 still recognized, but this influence is assigned a 

 relatively unimportant place in comparison with the 

 effect of such factors as erosion by wind and water, 

 the slow and invisible folding of the earth's crust 

 due to pressure and contraction, and the deposit 

 of sediment by rivers. In the same way sociology 

 will become a positive science when it adopts the 



