Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/852

 832 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

of themselves have produced the French Revolution. These ills, more- over, have been woefully exaggerated, says Dr. Patten. No, this great social upheaval was caused alone by the economic change which forced wheat out of France into England.

The central idea of the book is that economic conditions deter- mine the development of civilization and thought in any particular epoch, and the type of man that shall survive. Therefore, new philos- ophies develop out of new economic conditions and not out of old theories. In the end, the philosophies may blend, but this blending is an afterthought, and is not due to the second philosophy having sprung from the first. To the ideas of St. Simon and Louis Blanc, that the two factors which form history are economic desires and eco- nomic progress, he adds a third, that of national character. "The interplay of the character forces in men and the economic forces in their environment causes progress," he tells us on p. 13. We thus see that Dr. Patten gives almost as much weight to the influence of national character on the development of civilization as Le Bon when he says, "The character of a people is the keynote to its destiny. It creates its destiny ;" or as Bagehot, when he declares : " By far and out of all question the most important of all circumstances affecting polit- ical problems is national character." Le Bon, in his Lois psychologiques de revolution des peuples, says that the mental constitution or character of a race represents, not only the synthesis of the living beings which compose it, but, above all, that of the ancestors who have contributed to form it. It is not the living but the dead that play the preponder- ating role in the existence of a people. They are the creators of its morals and the unconscious motives for its conduct. We find much the same thought in Dr. Patten's careful analysis of national character. For he tells us that the forces generated by the present environment are not the only forces that determine the action of the men who live in it. Past environments still exert force through the modifications they have made in national character. These two forces are always in conflict. The ideas holding over from the past give tone to the civil- ization. The remodeling influences come from conditions set by the immediate environment, and through them the economic forces get their power (p. 13).

Dr. Patten chooses the three epochs of English history since the time of the Reformation for illustration of his theory. England, on account of its isolation, presents the best field for the study of normal thought development, and in the three epochs just mentioned English