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 54 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

seems to have detected it five centuries before Christ, but the twentieth Christian century will doubtless long have been ancient history before many men learn to take full account of the time- worn truth.

It must be admitted that the greater part of the world's observations in this connection up to date have been merely inaccurate rhetorical advertisements of facts which require more precise investigation. For our present purpose these inexact descriptions are sufficient. We are laying stress upon the fact that a physical environment not only always exists around every society, but that it always affects the activity, character, and organization of that society. No one can measure, in any gen- erally valid formulas, the force of this environment. Our present point is that it has force, that this force is incessant, that it is powerful, that it is a factor which may never be ignored, either in accounting for human affairs in the past or in planning for human welfare in the future.

Although we may find more precise examination of the facts in more recent literature, we cannot find more forcible general statement, and perhaps not more vivid illustration, than in Buckle's excursion into the history of civilization. For instance, his genera] thesis may be adopted bodily as a perception for which there is a permanent place in sociology :

When we consider the incessant contact between man and the external world, it is certain that there must be an intimate connection between human actions and physical laws ; so that, if physical science has not hitherto been brought to bear upon history, the reason is either that historians have not perceived the connection, or else that, having perceived it, they have been destitute of the knowledge by which its workings can be traced. Hence there has arisen an unnatural separation of the two great departments of inquiry, the study of the internal and that of the external, and, although in the present state of European literature there are some unmistakable symp- toms of a desire to break down this artificial barrier, still it must be admitted that as yet nothing has been actually accomplished toward effecting so great an end. The moralists, the theologians, and the metaphysicians continue to prosecute their studies without much respect for what they deem the inferior labors of scientific men ; whose inquiries indeed they frequently attack, as dangerous to the interests of religion, and as inspiring us with an undue con- fidence in the resources of the human understanding. On the other hand, the