Читать книгу Principles of Sociology - Spencer Herbert - Страница 15

Such are the factors in outline. Even when presented under this most general form, the combination of them is seen to be of an involved kind.

Recognizing the primary truth that social phenomena depend in part on the natures of the individuals and in part on the forces the individuals are subject to, we see that these two fundamentally-distinct sets of factors, with which social changes commence, give origin to other sets as social changes advance. The pre-established environing influences, inorganic and organic, which are at first almost unalterable, become more and more altered by the actions of the evolving society. Simple growth of population brings into play fresh causes of transformation that are increasingly important. The influences which the society exerts on the natures of its units, and those which the units exert on the nature of the society, incessantly co-operate in creating new elements. As societies progress in size and structure, they work on one another, now by their war-struggles and now by their industrial intercourse, profound metamorphoses. And the ever-accumulating, ever-complicating super-organic products, material and mental, constitute a further set of factors which become more and more influential causes of change. So that, involved as the factors are at the beginning, each step in advance increases the involution, by adding factors which themselves grow more complex while they grow more powerful.

But now having glanced at the factors of all orders, original and derived, we must neglect for the present those which are derived, and attend exclusively, or almost exclusively, to those which are original. The Data of Sociology, here to be dealt with, we must, as far as possible, restrict to those primary data common to social phenomena in general, and most readily distinguished in the simplest societies. Adhering to the broad division made at the outset between the extrinsic and intrinsic co-operating causes, we will consider first the extrinsic.

 1 It is worth noting that drainage increases what we may figuratively call terrestrial respiration; and that on terrestrial respiration the lives of land-plants, and therefore of land-animals, and therefore of men, depend. Every change of atmospheric, pressure produces exits or entrances of the air into all the interstices of the soil. The depth to which these irregular inspirations and expirations reach, is increased by freedom from water; since interstices occupied by water cannot be filled by air. Thus those chemical decompositions effected by the air that is renewed with every fall and rise of the barometer, are extended to a greater depth by drainage; and the plant-life depending on such decompositions is facilitated.