Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/761

Rh It might be extended to embrace the ruder forms of art, but it has chiefly to do with race characteristics as the result of those individualities that have been mentioned, including everything that serves to differentiate the groups of human beings found inhabiting the earth. In short it is par excellence the natural history of man.

The second subdivision of the subject, which relates to human achievement, as distinguished from man himself, considers everything which can, in the broadest acceptation of the term, be classed under the head of human institutions. This branch deals essentially with what ethnologists denominate culture, and constitutes history proper. The several stages of culture, savagery, barbarism, civilization, enlightenment, or by whatever names they may be designated, are so many steps in the general progress of what is called civilization in the broader and more popular sense. The study of this is also a branch of natural history, since, properly, all history is natural history, but here we are one remove farther from the biological base from which the natural history of man, as I have defined it, directly proceeds. Especially does the psychological element now distinctly make itself felt, and the qualities we have to deal with instead of being mainly physical become almost exclusively psychical. The animal world, properly speaking, achieves nothing. It may work changes, more or less extensive, in the face of nature, but this is merely the incidental result of activities which do not have any such effect for their object. Nothing in the nature of art exists below the human stage, and in that treatment of man from which art is abstracted human achievement is also necessarily omitted. Man is considered as an active being, indeed, as constantly doing something, but not as ever making anything. In the history of culture, as distinguished from the natural history of man, he is considered as primarily a producer of what did not exist before. While we are unacquainted with any stage of human history in which these two states do not coexist, it is a highly logical mode of studying the subject to treat them apart.

The causes which originally led to human association were