INCREASE OF AMORALISM 245 



endeavour to remedy this state of afEairs by means of pious 

 exhortations. In every other branch of science — -whether mathe- 

 matics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology — 

 we are accustomed to search for a cause adequate to every effect. 

 In sociology alone is this research of adequate causality often 

 neglected, and we content ourselves with explanations wholly 

 insufficient and highly improbable. When we speak of moral 

 distress being curable by means of exhortations and advice, we 

 appear to ignore the nature of moral distress, and to suppose 

 that our exhortations possess some magic power of exorcising 

 the evil. But the positivist method teaches us to search every- 

 where after causality ; and if we consider the moral constitution 

 of a people to be a system of definite forces which cannot be dis- 

 turbed or rearranged by means of simple injunctions, we must seek 

 the remedy for our present condition of moral instability elsewhere. 

 The cause of amoralism lies, as we have shown, in the exces- 

 sive individualism which is a characteristic of the present phase 

 of our Western civilisation. This individualism is the last term 

 of a process of evolution, the tendency of which, throughout the 

 history of society, has been the persistent destruction of the 

 successive principles which have ensured the integration of the 

 various social types by the adaptation of the individual to his 

 social surroundings. At the beginning society was organised 

 on the basis of the family ; it was constituted by the union of a 

 certain number of smaller societies, or clans, and all the members 

 of each clan considered themselves as related one to another. 

 But this organisation does not appear to have lasted long in 

 its primitive form. Very early already the family ceased to 

 be a political unit, in order to become the centre of private life. 

 The territorial group is substituted for the ancient domestic 

 group. The individuals occupying the same territory acquire 

 gradually, independently of all family ties, common ideals and 

 morals, which difEer in a greater or lesser degree from the ideas 

 and morals prevalent among the inhabitants of the adjoining 



