"But presently, within the aggregation, a consciousness of kind appears in like individuals and develops into association. Association, in its turn, begins to react favorably on the pleasures and on the life chances of individuals."
To deal properly with the several questions thus raised I must go back to the beginning. In my first work, Social Statics, published in 1850, will be found evidence that at the very outset I regarded the Science of Society as having for its chief datum the Science of Mind. This was not overtly asserted, for at that time questions concerning the filiation of the sciences were not entertained by me; but it was taken for granted as an obvious truth. All through the work there runs the implication that societies are determined in their actions and structures by the mental characters of their units; and in a closing chapter, entitled "General Considerations,"there is a delineation of the way in which, along with mental evolution in men, there goes higher social evolution. Here are some extracts indicating this:
"So that only by giving us some utterly different mental constitution could the process of civilization have been altered."
"Dependent as they are upon popular character, established political systems can not die out until the feeling which upholds them dies out."
"So that wild races deficient in the allegiance-producing sentiment can not enter into a civilized state at all; but have to be supplanted by others that can."
"Of course the institutions of any given age exhibit the compromise made by these contending moral forces at the signing of their last truce."
"The process by which a change of political arrangements is effected, when the incongruity between them and the popular character becomes sufficient, must be itself in keeping with that character, and must be violent or peaceful accordingly."
That these conceptions remained unchanged in 1860, when the prospectus of the Synthetic Philosophy was issued, might be inferred even from the order of the subjects specified in it, which ran:—Principles of Biology, Principles of Psychology, Principles of Sociology. But this prospectus contains much more definite evidence of my persistent belief in the dependence of Sociology upon Psychology. Of the divisions constituting the Principles of Psychology the last stands thus:—"VIII. Corollaries.—Consisting in part of a number of derivative principles which form a necessary introduction to sociology." And then in pursuance of the thought there expressed, the enumeration of the divisions constituting the Principles of Sociology begins thus:—"Part I. The Data of Sociology.—A statement of the several sets of factors entering into social phenomena—human ideas and feelings considered in their necessary order of evolution; surrounding natural conditions; and those ever complicating conditions to which society itself gives origin:" in which statement of data, be it ob-
