ABSTRACT
Basic adherence to evolutionary naturalism did provide early theorists with certain common assumptions about the nature of social change in spite of their varying inclinations to emphasize materialism or idealism in their social ontologies. The more predominantly idealist sociologists were also impressed with the significance of individual differences in the genesis of social change. Basically, all social change is to be approached as fundamentally one common process because all men are assumed to be one organically and psychically and their conditions of existence substantially similar. All shades and degrees of social and cultural differences of peoples who were often widely separated in space or time are assumed to be arrangeable between the poles of primitivity and modernity. In accordance with a growth model of change, early American social evolutionists tended to conceive of the rate of change as naturally slow, gradual, continuous, by degrees, and the amount as relatively imperceptible, infinitesimal, or small.
