48 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 
philosophy, especially in the last. He shows how this is especially 
characteristic of developed personality and how, in this respect, a 
society is not like a low form of organic life but like the highest. 
This process he terms social capitalization. Society is further 
like a personality in that it has consciousness, reason and will.? 
Another important contribution for our purpose is his distinc- 
tion between a normal and diseased organism. This concept he 
applies by analogy to society and develops especially in his La 
Pathologie Sociale. Disease may affect society in any one of the 
three departments, — industry, justice, or politics, — and these 
social maladies correspond to three forms of nervous disease, 
that of industry to insanity, that of justice to delirium, that of 
politics to paralysis. This last, however, can hardly be called a 
contribution to science of any kind. Ross scores Lilienfeld 
severely for such flimsy analogical reasoning.‘ 
The discussion of social pathology leads our author to the 
question of social therapeutics which in places is equally fanciful 
and unscientific. In bringing out this phase of group life he 
introduces a note which finds little place in the systems of Comte 
or Spencer. We have now the concept of social mal-adaptation 
and the problem of adjustment. 
Another analogy used by Lilienfeld which has had large use 
since, especially by pedagogical writers, is his bio-social law of 
recapitulation taken over from Haeckel, according to which the 
individual person recapitulates, in his development, the culture- 
periods of racial history.® 
The analogical method has been used too frequently as a device 
to exploit some pet theory without painstaking endeavor to dis- 
cover the forces at work in the process and formulate the laws of 
their operation. ‘This has been true to a considerable extent as 
we shall have occasion to note later, with much of the reasoning 
of the biological school of sociologists who are apt to assume 
1 Gedanken, pp. 55 f. 3 Barth, op. cit., pp. 103-105. 
2 Ibid., p. 61. 4 Foundations of Sociology, p. 48. 
5 Gedanken, i, pp. 245 ff. “‘ Die Stadien der menschlichen embryonalen Entwicke- 
lung eines jeden Individuums entsprechen der progressiven socialen Entwickelung 
des ganzen Menschengeschlechts in seiner stufenweisen Ausbildung in Verlaufe der 
ganzen Geschichte der Menschheit ”’ (ibid., p. 247). 
