Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/67

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 53

instance, that "man is what he thinks," and still further, "man is what other men make him." 1 These latter phases of the case are not now in point. Reserving these sides of human condi- tions for consideration in their turn, we have to provide in this part of our analysis for due insistence upon the inevitable impor- tance of the physical setting in which even the spiritual constitu- ents of life have their place. Like the warp through which the shuttle carries the threads of the web, these physical factors form the rude tissue which is in turn shot through and through by the dependent activities in every department of individual life and of the social process. 2

We are but dealing with the cosmic assumption a little more specifically when we concentrate attention upon men's more immediate physical environment. If we wish to approach close to the precise facts, we must put ourselves under the tuition of zoologist, physiologist, and experimental psychologist. This is their special territory. They are dealing with elements in the world of things, and particularly with manifestations of those elements, first, in the animal portion of the world of things, and, second, in the animal side of the world of people. Our present purpose is not to invade the territory of these specialists, but to indicate the direction in which the problems of sociology eventually run into theirs.

The fact which we indicate at this point is that populations differ from each other in consequence of differences in the geography, topography, and climate of the regions which they inhabit. This is no nineteenth-century discovery. Hippocrates

'"The 'social man' is a person who learns to judge by the judgments of society." (BALDWIN, Social and Ethical Interpretations, p. 154.)

arguments in which substantially what we are saying is emphasized, in some form or other, would require mention of nearly everything that has been written by the sys- tematic sociologists. SPENCER'S Synthetic Philosophy, FlSKE's Cosmic Philosophy, and LOTZE'S Microcosm may be named as giving place to the element we are considering, though in a range of thought more inclusive than sociology. WARD, AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, September and November, 1895, and Outlines of Sociology, chaps, ii and iii, and RATZENHOFER, Sociologische Erkenniniss,fe'&-\i, are symp- tomatic of sociology in general in its apprehension of the same. EMERSON draws edifying mysticism from the same perception in his essay on the Perpetual Forces.
 * That this is strictly commonplace is evident from the fact that citations of all the