Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/535

Rh resultant of physical and spiritual forces, reacting upon each other in the most complex combinations which we know. They will not be summed up in any simple equation of a single term. The views of history which exaggerate a cooperating factor into an exclusive factor, and assume that a constant influence is a monopoly of influence, are gradually forcing us to study new terms in the social problem. Each partial view of the influences that have made and remade men and associations gives us a distinct factor about which correlated search by the different kinds of sociologists must find means of answering the general question: "In what cases does this factor work; with what tendencies does it work; with what ratio of force does it work?" In other words, the sociological scheme which appropriates the lessons of previous failure to penetrate the social mystery will have a use for all accessible knowledge about the time, place, direction, and intensity of the purely topographical and climatological factors among social influences; but for the same reason it will have an appropriate place also for all the other influences that may be discovered.

Earth's third title is "The Ethnological View of History." It is not easy to draw a sharp line of division between this view and the second, just noticed. Of the two, the view now to be considered seems to have more prominence in today's social science. It appears less extravagant, less open to the suspicion of being crass materialism and mechanicalism, and therefore less taxing to the credulity. It is easier to see, or to imagine that we see, how the Teutons and the Romans could coalesce in a third something which turns out to be the Carolingian empire, than to see how the dust of one peninsula, stirred by one set of breezes, made Spartans, while the dust of another peninsula, vexed by other breezes, made Etruscans. The traditional belief that blood tells prepares a welcome in our minds for the stock-breeder's theory of history. It is supposed to have such backing in the findings of biology that the people who get the view fairly into their minds are strongly tempted to trust in its all-sufficiency, and to abandon further search for historical explanations. Indeed the ethnologists and the orthodox economists are the closest