individual, but which impose themselves upon all men, and which, whether men will or no, govern the composition, the functional action and the evolution of societies. To distinguish such of these laws as pertain to wealth is the natural aim of economic science.
But it is upon this conception of natural laws that sociology must build, since sociology—science and not art, we repeat again—is the study of the different aspects under which the activity of men living in society naturally manifests itself. In order that this study might be possible it was necessary that the idea of natural laws should become distinct in turn in connection with the facts of organization and of evolution, moral, religious, intellectual, political and even juridical. It is only in our time that this conception has become clear in all these domains successively,—hence the science of sociology is so young. Moreover, in order that this notion of natural law should emerge in these different domains it was necessary that it should come from a contiguous territory. It was from political economy that the notion was imported and consequently to the economists belongs the honor of having laid the first foundations of the general science of societies.
It must be further said that political economy has not simply furnished to sociology the general abstract idea of scientific law. It has done more. It has contributed to sociology certain of its own laws, which are found to apply not merely among the facts pertaining to wealth, but among all social facts. The most important of these laws is that of division of labor. To Adam Smith this was the great law of the production of wealth. Herbert Spencer went further and pointed out that this law controls all the evolution of all social machinery. He showed that it operates in the case of the political, the religious, the juridical organization of societies, that in every case, when these organs develop they divide into different sections, and that each assumes exclusively a part of the work which was at first performed by the whole organism. The same law manifests itself in biology, where the multiplication of organs is always accompanied by their differentiation. Thus Spencer was able to say that in all activities we see the
