The following extract, freely translated and substantially abridged, is taken from chapter i of DeGreef's Introduction à la Sociologie:—
It is in vain that Spencer protests against the accusation that he has assimilated the laws of biology with those of sociology. The confusion is everywhere complete. He has not indicated a single law, nor a single phenomenon, which has not its correspondent, if not its equivalent, in the antecedent sciences. Draper, in his History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, adopts precisely the doctrine that the laws of biology apply equally to sociology. Man is the archetype of society. Nations pass through their periods of infancy, adolescence, maturity, age, death. This sort of thing makes sociology wholly unnecessary. The attempt of Stanley Jevons to explain economic crises by sun-spots, so far from being an effort of genius, is simply a jeu d'esprit. It is simply a recognition of the common fact that climate is one of the factors that influence man in society. According to Hesiod, physical forces first engender each other, then in turn the gods and man. Since then, social science has in turn been founded on the laws of astronomy, chemistry and biology. To-day it is the last, vitiated, further, by false psychological notions about the power and unlimited liberty of the reason, and the consciousness of human individuals, and applied by analogy to the collective reason.
The error consists in looking for the explanation of social phenomena in the most general laws. This is natural within certain limits, but has been pushed to extreme, but logical consequences, by the American, Carey (Social Science). He looks, in effect, to one of the oldest sciences, and one, consequently, relating to the most highly general phenomena, those of astronomy, for the universal laws of society. Geometry, he holds, gives us principles equally valid for the chemist, the sociologist, and for him who measures the earth. A system assuming to explain complex phenomena solely by the laws of phenomena more simple, may be compared to the effort to give an account of a book, not by reading it line by line, but by examining the cover and the title-page.
As DeGreef elsewhere puts it, there is a hierarchy in science, proceeding from the more general to the less general, depending on the nature of the phenomena studied. This hierarchy has been variously stated. Comte puts it thus: mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology, social physics (sociology). Baldwin,[101] writing much later, of course, puts it thus:—
So here, as elsewhere, there is a gradation, a hierarchy, in science: chemistry necessary to life, but not itself of life; forces in the environment necessary to evolution, but not themselves vital; life-processes necessary to consciousness, but not themselves mental; consciousness necessary to society, but not all consciousness social; social consciousness necessary to social organization, but not all social consciousness actually in a social organization.
Now the point with DeGreef is that the special laws of each successively narrower group of phenomena are to be explained only by concrete study, and that it is wholly vain to think that the application of principles drawn from other, more general groups of phenomena give us these laws. Thus the economists talk of "equilibria" between various economic forces, just as if they were physical forces;[102] and a whole school of mathematical economists has arisen, who find economic life a thing that will fit into equations. This work is valuable, but it is not final. Analogies are helpful, but are not ultimate. Similarly, the biological conception, which likens society to a man, has its contributions. The biological analogy has been pushed very far: thus Novikow calls the social intellectual élite the social sensorium; Lilienfeld likens the action of a mob to female hysterics; Simiand calls the idle rich the adipose tissue of society, the priests also represent fat, while the police are the social phagocytes which eat up wandering criminal cells.[103] But this, though suggestive, is not an ultimate social philosophy or even an approach to it. Even DeGreef, as I shall indicate a little later, errs by trying to trace a too rigid parallel between individual structure and social structure. We must introduce a careful study of the peculiarly social phenomena, those phenomena which are to be found only in society, before we are privileged to talk of a social organism or a social mind.[104]
On the other hand, it seems to me that Baldwin has erred in the opposite direction. The laws of chemistry do not cease to be operative in the human body, even though more complex biological laws operate there. And the laws of biology are not suspended just because an animal organism develops a mind. The greatest defect of the older psychology, against which the experimental psychology is a reaction, was its failure to take proper account of physical processes connected with consciousness. Now society, according to Baldwin, is best described as analogous to a psychological organization, and such an organization as is found in the individual in ideal thinking.[105] But surely this is an abstraction, and not a fact. Society does not cease to be physical, chemical, biological, subconscious, merely because it has also attained in part a higher form of psychical activity (to which Professor Baldwin would object on the basis of his distinction between the "social" and the "socionomic").
DeGreef's conception seems to me better, on this logical point,—though of course Baldwin's analysis of facts represents a great advance—but it is not satisfactory:[106]—
Since unconsciousness, instinct, and reflex action characterize the psychic life of inferior beings, and even the greater part of the intellectual activity of those most highly developed, man included, we ought not to be astonished, a priori, that the collective force which constitutes the social superorganism presents the same characteristics.