Perhaps the first requisite in the making of a sociologist is that he learn to see things habitually in this way.
If, then, we say that society is an organism, we mean, I suppose, that it is a complex of forms or processes each of which is living and growing by interaction with the others, the whole being so unified that what takes place in one part affects all the rest. It is a vast tissue of reciprocal activity, differentiated into innumerable systems, some of them quite distinct, others not readily traceable, and all interwoven to such a degree that you see different systems according to the point of view you take.[[2]]
It is not the case, as many suppose, that there is anything in the idea of organism necessarily opposed to the idea of freedom. The question of freedom or unfreedom is rather one of the kind of organism or of organic process, whether it is mechanical and predetermined, or creative and inscrutable. There may be an organic freedom, which exists in the whole as well as in the parts, is a total as well as a particular phenomenon. It may be of the very nature of life and found in all the forms of life. Darwin seems to have believed in something of this kind, as indicated by his unwillingness to regard the dinosaur as lacking in free will.[[3]]
The organic view of freedom agrees with experience and common sense in teaching that liberty can exist in the individual only as he is part of a whole which is also free, that it is false to regard him as separate from or antithetical to the larger unity. In other words the notion of an opposition between organism and freedom is a phase of the “individualistic” philosophy which regarded social unity as artificial and restrictive.
CHAPTER III
CYCLES
THE CYCLICAL CHARACTER OF SOCIAL PROCESS—THE CYCLES ORGANIC, NOT MECHANICAL—THE GROWTH AND DECAY OF NATIONS—DOES HISTORY REPEAT ITSELF?
It is a familiar observation that there is a cyclical character in all the movements of history. Every form of organization has its growth, its vicissitudes, and sooner or later, probably, its decline and disappearance. The mob assembles and disperses, fashions come in and go out, business prosperity rises, flourishes, and gives way to depression, the Roman Empire, after centuries of greatness, declines and falls.
This is a trait of life in general, and the explanation does not pertain especially to sociology. Still, if we assume that social process is made up of functional forms or organisms working onward by a tentative method, we can see that their history is naturally cyclical. Any particular form represents an experiment, conscious or otherwise, and is never absolutely successful but has constantly to be modified in order to meet better the conditions under which it functions. If it does this successfully it grows, but even in the growing it usually becomes more complex and systematic and hence more difficult to change as regards its general type. In the course of time the type itself is likely to lose its fitness to the conditions, and so the whole structure crumbles and is resolved into elements from which new structures are nourished. The parties, the doctrines, the institutions of the past are for the most part as dead as the men.
Where institutions, like Christianity, have survived for a millennium or two, it is commonly not their organization that has endured, but a very general idea or sentiment which has vitalized successive systems, each of which has had its cycle of prosperity and decay.
It does not follow that a social cycle is in any way mechanical or predetermined, any more than it follows that the individual life is so because each of us sooner or later declines and dies.