al cord, as Marx said, which connects
the individual consciousness with the collective consciousness is cut.
The personality becomes more and more emancipated. But on what does this
phenomenon, so big with consequences, itself depend? The author goes to
social morphology for the answer: it is, he says, the growing density
of population which brings with it this increasing differentiation of
activities. But, again, why? Because the greater density, in thrusting
men up against each other, augments the intensity of their competition
for the means of existence; and for the problems which society thus has
to face differentiation of functions presents itself as the gentlest
solution.

Here one sees that the writer borrows directly from Darwin. Competition
is at its maximum between similars, Darwin had declared; different
species, not laying claim to the same food, could more easily coexist.
Here lay the explanation of the fact that upon the same oak hundreds
of different insects might be found. Other things being equal, the same
applies to society. He who finds some unadopted speciality possesses a
means of his own for getting a living. It is by this division of their
manifold tasks that men contrive not to crush each other. Here
we obviously have a Darwinian law serving as intermediary in the
explanation of that progress of division of labour which itself explains
so much in the social evolution.

And we might take another example, at the other end of the series of
sociological systems. G. Tarde is a sociologist with the most pronounced
anti-naturalistic views. He has attempted to show that all application
of the laws of natural science to society is misleading. In his
"Opposition Universelle" he has directly combatted all forms of
sociological Darwinism. According to him the idea that the evolution of
society can be traced on the same plan as the evolution of species is
chimerical. Social evolution is at the mercy of all kinds of inventions,
which by virtue of the laws of imitation modify, through individual to
individual, through neighbourhood to neighbourhood, the general state
of those beliefs and desires which are the only "quantities" whose
variation matters to the sociologist. But, it may be rejoined, that
however psychical the forces may be, they are none the less subject
to Darwinian laws. They compete with each other; they struggle for the
mastery of minds. Between types of ideas, as between organic forms,
select