Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/538

 522 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

questions unexplored. Whatever may be the form which our conclusions may one day take about the influence of the body upon the mind, our interpretation of human events must have respect to this by-product of ethnological theory, namely, the observation that different ethnic and tribal groups somehow come to be the vehicles of a tradition which, so far as effects appear, might as well be part and parcel of their physical struc- ture. Their bodies and their tradition of thought and feeling constantly function together. The colored and the white ele- ments in the United States, for example, are not made up of individuals of absolutely identical force in the social equation. A group of colored men and a group of white men, who had passed through schools of the same grade in the same city, would not be social forces of identical quality and equal energy, for the reason that they somehow carry along unlike traditions from unlike conditions in the past. We may see these differences in men, and we should see them as they manifest themselves in racial peculiarities. On the other hand, we should not assume that these racial manifestations present to us irreducible factors of human force. That would be like a theory of chemistry which assumes that vapor and water and ice are three irreducible elements.

The final solution of the social mystery will have an answer to the question: "What is the value of the racial factor in the social equation ? " Meanwhile, neither physiology nor zoologj' nor ethnology nor history lends sanction to the superficial assumption that the social equation is an affair of only one set of variables, namely, the racial characteristics of peoples. When we have in mind the ethnic factor in the social problem, it is necessary to render the sociological question in this form : "What is the formula of the racial factor in its combinations with all the other factors in the social equation?"

Earth's fourth title is "The Culture-History View." The very idea of "culture," as the term is used among German scholars, has hardly entered distinctly into American calcula- tions. In order to indicate the viewpoint which is occupied by the interpreters to whom the title of this paragraph applies, it is