Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/66

 52 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

There is a favorite fancy in Germany that insomnia is more prevalent at the full of the moon than during the rest of the month. It is no fancy that every motion of every individual life has its proportional place in that organization of cosmic force of which it is a minute fragment. It is superstition to ask what were the positions of the stars when the Prince of Wales or President Kruger was born, and to construct horoscopes to fore- tell the incidents of their career. It is science to trace the com- munity of substance and of destiny between our earth and the rest of the cosmic system, and to learn how the specific condi- tions that prevail here are but details of the common conditions which obtain throughout the universe. It is a parody of science to select some single form in which matter moves say gravita- tion and to go through the motions of explaining all physi- cal and human facts in terms of this form alone. It is the utmost sobriety and wisdom to realize that all physical and human facts have universal antecedents in common. Sociologi- cal discernment has the task of discovering, in the first place, how far and how decisively this universal physical element interpene- trates the subsequent and special human manifestations which are our immediate concern. The omnipresence of the universal cosmic conditions around and within every human motion is the first prime factor to be estimated at its actual relative worth in every analysis of an individual act or of a group status. When Feuerbach said, "Man is what he eats," he would have been wholly right if man did nothing but eat. Man is what he eats plus the other things that have been organized into his nature by the other things that he does. If we understand Feuerbach to mean the human species, as distinct from the lower orders of animals, our assent is still qualified in the same way, but in a lesser degree. If we understand the proposition as referring to individual men, it is true, of course, only if we credit the individual specimen first with all the eating that all his ancestors have done, and then with all their other care of them- selves, with all the air they have breathed, and with all the work or rest that has exhausted or conserved their force. Even then we must balance the one hyperbole with others, and say, for