INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 499
units. All societies are superorganisms, endowed not only with a general sensibility, as are all other organisms, or a special sensibility, as are some other organisms, but they advance from the simplest forms of the latter to the highest, to a reasonable and even methodical collective life. Therefore, as societies are plastic and modifiable par excellence, they are able to interfere methodically in their own constitution, in their own government. On the one hand, the social organs become so much the more sensible, so much the more reasonable in each category of organs, as they assume superior forms. Thus in the economic system, the boards of conciliation, the councils of labor, of industry, and of agriculture are superior forms of sensibility and adaptation ; on the other hand, the highest social functions are also the most sensible ; they are so much more intelligent than the primary functions that the sociologists have wrongly divided social facts into two classes, material and ideological. Thus, the juridic sensibility, especially the political, is more intense than the economic sensibility. The superior social forms are the most conscious, the most rational. This superior sensi- bility is especially the accompaniment of new forms. More- over, it is a relative superiority, for the earlier forms have lost, in part, their conscious characteristic only because of their ancientness itself; they also were superior and conscious at the time of their development. The service of posts and railways has lost its conscious contractual characteristic and has become automatic.
Social contractualism is, then, the distinctive and most im- portant sociological phenomenon, from the qualitative point of view. It is anterior to the division of labor and appears as soon as there is homogeneous co-operation. It is the conscious method par excellence of the collective life, although it may manifest itself unconsciously, and although it may be trans- formed into unconscious and automatic modes of activity; that is to say, the organization and activity of societies are not merely the spontaneous products of their constitutive elements, but they may be likewise the results of their conscious action upon themselves. It is precisely by their methodical activity
