Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/42

 3O AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s., 22, 1920

emulate in his study, it readily appears that what he essays is the determination of constants. In this endeavor he will have with him all those whose minds are wont to be perturbed by the contempla- tion of the immensely complicated and apparently disorderly suc- cessions of historic happenings. But here there arises one further query. Suppose such a constant, nay, a set of constants, were disclosed, thus greatly enhancing our insight into historical pro- cesses. Still, from what we know of history and of man (as he has come to be), it is but reasonable to expect that these constants would not prove a complete rationale of history, but of certain more or less prominent aspects of it. Now, in the facts and successions constituting the subject-matter of the natural-historical sciences there also are discernible certain constants as well as certain variants, but it so happens that the variants, in these cases, do not interest us, or interest us but slightly; fortunately so, for, as the author notes, we lack the means of reconstructing the minutiae of these processes and of chronologizing them. Not so in history. Without attempt- ing to raise from well-deserved historical obscurity the proverbial death of a neighbor's cat, it is but fair to doubt whether the his- toric constants when disclosed will cover all that is theoretic- ally interesting and humanly significant. To disregard such residual facts and successions would be to sacrifice reality to method, to accept them, on the other hand, would mean to assign to the results of the method a relatively modest place as heuristic 4 :ools in historic study.

We may now proceed to an examination of the author's con- stants. The second chapter on "The Geographical Factor in History" is devoted to a demonstration of what Professor Teggart calls "the homogeneity of history." The thesis in the author's own words is as follows:

The fundamental basis of argument for holding that the history of man every- where is of the same fabric, does not rest upon the inter-connection of events, but may be stated in the form that the varying experiences of human groups have been similiarly conditioned by the varying aspects of the conformation of the globe. Man cannot escape the physical world in which he lives, nor its infinite diversification; this is obvious, but it will require some illustration to make clear the fact that the even-handed dominance of nature leads inevitably to widely different results in the lives of men (pp. 44-5).

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