Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/539

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 523

necessary to define words in a way not yet adopted as a rule in English usage.

What, then, is "culture" [KttltJis) in the German sense? To be sure, the Germans themselves are not wholly consistent in their use of the term, but it has a technical sense which it is necessary to define. In the first place, "culture" is a condition or achievement possessed by society. It is not individual. Our phrase "a cultured person" does not employ the term in the German sense. For that, German usage has another word, " gebildet," and the peculiar possession of the "gebildeter Mann" is not " culture " but " Bildung." If we should accept the German term "culture" in its technical sense, we should have no better equivalent for "Bildung," etc., than " education" and "edu- cated," which convey too much of the association of school dis- cipline to render the German conception in its entire scope. At all events, whatever names we adopt, there is such social possession, different from the individual state, which consists of adaptation in thought and action to the conditions of life.

Again, the Germans distinguish between "culture" and " civilization." Thus " civilization is the ennobling, the increased control of the elementary human impulses by society. Culture, on the other hand, is the control of nature by science and art." That is, civilization is one side of what we call politics ; culture is our whole body of technical equipment, in the way of knowledge, process, and skill for subduing and employing natural resources.

Now there are very positive theories based on human tech- nology as the one determining factor, and even the efificient cause, of all social development. These views are indicated when Earth speaks of the "culture-history idea." The theorem is that men's ways of dealing with nature have been the cause of their spiritual life, and of their social and political conditions. Here belong at first glance all the numerous writers who have divided the history of the race into periods, according to the kind of tools or implements that men have used. It may be that the apparent importance of the method is not real enough to make their view quite as one-sided in this respect as the classification