THE BASIS OF SOCIALITY^'^ 



By Arthur Allin 



To join the hue and cry against Spencer's analogical compari- 

 son of society with an organism, though popular in certain sociolog- 

 ical circles, is paying but scant respect to the real value of one of 

 the pioneer attempts to secure a scientific basis for that foundling 

 science — sociology. As a heuristisches Princl]) its most perdurable 

 value lies in the fact that it has materially aided in the consideration 

 of the sociological as a continuation of the biological. Strictly 

 speaking, the biological probably includes human interaction or the 

 social phenomena of human life, but for the purposes of a division 

 of labor in the scientific world there has been a strong unconscious, 

 though some unkind critic will say all too conscious, current in favor 

 of founding a new discipline and department of human knowledge. 

 Certainly the problems are ample enough to justify the division, and 

 despite the similarity of laws the differences are sufficient to mark 

 the boundaries of a new province of scientific research. Darwin's 

 Origin of Species was really a description of organic technology, and 

 the extra-organic sense and motor organs of social evolution are but 

 the extensions of the tools and instruments which were so successful 

 in the organic confiict. Organic heredity is continued in social 

 heredity, the instinctive giving way, as second in importance, to oral 

 and written tradition and the transmission of institutional life. The 

 organic gains of the individual become objectified and perpetuated 

 for all time in the environment, and an attainable object of posses- 

 sion for all socially minded people. The language of gestures of or- 

 ganic biology becomes the language of symbols with its priceless 

 economy of time and labor. These laws and many others provide 



(1) Reprinted by courtesy of the Editor of the American Journal of Sociology. Vol. VIII, 

 July, 1902. 



