Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/689

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 673

Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, and many archipelagos to the north of Scotland. Like the Germans, they colonized England. The Germans were by no means held within the kingdom of Germany, but were found as far as the southern Crimea. The Slavs extended from the Baltic to the Adriatic ; at the beginning of the tenth century they had just been cut in two by the Hungarian invasion. They still peopled the marches of the Elbe, Pomerania, Prussia proper, Lithuania, the greater part of the grand duchy of Russia, Poland, White Croatia, Moravia, and Bohemia. In the south they occupied Carinthia and Carniola in the German king- dom, and Croatia, Servia, and the kingdom of Bulgaria besides. Turkish populations occupied the southeast of Europe; and the Ugrians, Finnish populations, the northeast; the latter were joined by the Livonians, the Mordvins, etc., and other Hunno- Ugrian peoples, such as the Hungarians and the Bachkirs. Finally, in the midst of a considerable number of superimposed or mingled racial elements, the Greeks were dominant in the part of the Balkan peninsula which had remained in the power of the emperors of the East, but they were spread over almost the whole circumference of the Mediterranean, in Europe, in Asia, and in Africa.

But nowhere, in no political grouping, does the race confuse its frontiers with those of the state; everywhere also there is a tendency toward the juxtaposition and the fusion of races. Add to this that the characters which constitute a race are characters acquired by differentiation, selection, and adaptation; characters transmitted by heredity, not original, but, on the contrary, derived; how then can one think of establishing political and artificial, and above all final, groupings upon such a fragile basis ? This is no more serious than to wish to bound societies by moun- tains, rivers, and basins. A society is something more complex than its purely ethnic factor, or than its purely physical factor; society is a combination of these two factors, giving birth to a new phenomenon, the social phenomenon. This is the result of their combination, and not of their simple addition ; for they are different materials which it is as impossible to add as it is pears and apples. And that is the reason why it is impossible, and will