MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY 1 1 5
circumstances and taking folks as they are, a given institution exists, but to establish a law of sequence within each department of social life. Morgan insists that there have been five succes- sive types of family, and that the order of appearance has been everywhere the same. Gumplowicz avers that there is "a strictly regular development from fetishism through anthropomorphism, polytheism, and monotheism, to the atheism of free thinkers." Letourneau declares that politically "human societies evolve regularly by successive stages which are anarchy, the communal clan, the tribe, at first republican, later aristocratic, then mon- archy, at first elective and later hereditary. Finally certain elite peoples repudiate monarchy and return to a regime repub- lican but very unlike that of the primitive tribe." De Greef sets up as the law of aesthetic development that "architecture always precedes sculpture, and sculpture precedes painting."
Now formulas of this sort not only quarrel scandalously with historical facts, but they rest on wrong notions of social causa- tion.
Today we can foretell the series of transformations through which a human being will pass from the earliest embryo stage on. Tomorrow we shall be charting his mental evolution from the first weeks of infancy to the end of adolescence. In vain, how- ever, does the sociologist aspire to do for society what the embryologist does for the body, and the genetic psychologist for the mind. The organism obeys the wand of heredity, but society has no heredity. It is not unfolding what was once folded into it, as the embryo unfolds the predetermined parts and organs. Institutions have not developed, as Morgan sug- gests, from "a few primary germs of thought." "In any order of social facts," says Tarde, "evolution takes place by successive insertions .... thereby making the course of progress not a smooth, gentle, upward slope, but a ladder with rungs at very unequal distances." Far from traveling a common highway the peoples have followed routes as various as have been their con- ditions of life.
If the genetic sociologist does not conceive of an institution as having an "organic development" of its own, he is very liable
