No detailed exposition is requisite to show how remote this method of causal explanation of social phenomena is from the hypothesis that refers the whole past course of social evolution to the class war, or regards the class war as the sole factor of importance in the making of the future. From the standpoint of Lombroso, a moral organization which would transform its advocates from fighters for the interests of the community to fighters for the exclusive interests of a class would be condemned simply as moral insanity.[[37]] In his work on the anarchists he expresses himself in this sense (p. [16]), here, indeed, with reference to the governments, which in their political activity are not concerned exclusively with the interests of a particular class.
He has shown how nature produces socially important differentiations altogether apart from the co-operation of socially causative factors. The most important of these differentiations, that between the two sexes, was described by him exhaustively in the first part of his work on the female criminal and the prostitute; here, also, he discusses fully the significance of the natural organization of woman for social life in relation to motherhood.
His description of the natural organization of woman is only one part of the important contributions of Lombroso to sociology.
With regard to the natural differentiation of human beings, his work is summarized in the succeeding paragraphs (I do not think it necessary to refer here to the numerous passages in his works in which he elaborates, in greater or less detail, the views I am about to describe; for my account is based, in addition, more especially upon the direct exchange of ideas, by word of mouth and by correspondence, during an intimacy of many years’ duration):
Human beings are differentiated—horizontally, as it were—into tribes and nations in consequence of original variability, in consequence of selective œcological factors (soil and climate), and in consequence of wars, expulsions, and migrations.
This differentiation—greatly influenced by social factors, such as colonization, miscegenation, etc.—becomes organic, and this organic differentiation is of very great social importance.
In addition to this, there exists another kind of differentiation, which, to express it graphically, is vertical in character—viz., the formation of classes. This depends chiefly upon economic factors, which are competent to induce organic changes in isolated individuals, but not to lead to the formation of inheritable types—that is to say, of racial characteristics. As yet, at any rate, there is no inheritable type of homo industrialis, the proletarian.[[38]]
In addition to these two varieties of differentiation, there is yet a third kind, dependent upon purely organic causation, giving rise continually to new types with a great tendency to inheritance: talent and genius, the criminal and the saint, the various intermediate stages of sexual differentiation, which permits of so many nuances in the intensity of masculinity and femininity in man and woman. These differences arise altogether independently of social factors—Lombroso has never suggested the deliberate breeding of supermen—but they give rise to all-important disturbances and advances in social evolution.
Finally, in Lombroso’s view, the social evils dependent mainly on economic factors—malnutrition, overwork, unemployment, overcrowding, town life, vagabondage, accidents, celibacy, venereal diseases, alcoholism, cachexia—give rise, through the process of reproduction, to the great army of degenerates, who lack the faculty of adaptation, and therefore give rise to further disturbances of social life, to ever-renewed infractions of social order.
No other investigator has done as much as Lombroso for the description and recognition, by means of exact measurement and numeration, of the sociologically important, non-ethnic varieties of the human species, homo sapiens. Inspired by the great idea of evolution, he earnestly endeavoured to elucidate the most obscure secrets of organic life; but it was precisely by means of his profound knowledge and understanding of the organic realm that he was safeguarded from attempting to base his sociological thought upon the superficial analogy between the loose association of individuals in society and the intimate interconnection of the cells of a living organism by means of which they are all fused into a unitary being.