Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/534

 5l8 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Edinburgh, is the most energetic expounder of this idea in the English-speaking world. Not the most prominent geographer but the most scholarly exponent of this particular anthropo- geographical idea on the continent today is Ratzel, of Leipzig (^A?ithropo-Geographie). Ratzel, again, is to be classed with Herder and Ritter in placing his peculiar perception in balance with cooperating forces. He aims to show the ways in which humanity depends upon the spatial relations of the earth. While the analysis of influences from the environment, as carried out by Ratzel, is full of instruction, and while it opens up still uncultivated fields of research, it is still comparatively free from the fault of historical one-sidedness. Not so with men who have taken up this clue to history without the corrective which Ratzel expresses in the words : " Not nature, but mind, produces culture." For instance, Mougeolle •• declares: "Thus the environment alone can truly explain the chief events of history, and furnish the solution of its most general problems."

As in the case of the individualistic conception of history, so with this exaggerated estimate of the part that nature has played in the formation of human society. Doubtless the social problem has waited longer than it ought for adequate formulation, because many men have too implicitly and literally believed with Plato that "ideas make the world." Such men have told the story of history as though it were a ghost-dance on a floor of clouds. They have tried to explain how spirits with indiscernible bodies have brought about the visible results. They would not admit that the facts of human association have been the work of flesh- and-blood men with their feet on the ground. How much of the soil and the sunshine and the wind and snow and rain has lodged itself in men's works and ways remains to be determined. At all events we have been taught by the contradictions of extremists that history in the future will neither be turned over entirely to the weather bureau, nor will it be exclusively the affair of the introspective rhapsodist. Human fortunes are not diluted climatology. They are not visualized spirituality, in any sense at least which we can comprehend. They are the


 * Le Problime de I'Histoire, Paris, 1886.