Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/207

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOL OGY 1 9 3

self-supporting and the pauper, interest groupings and likeness groupings, differentiation and assimilation. These dateless and placeless antitheses that appear not once but continually, not between societies but within the same society, and so frequently that the society or the epoch often derives its distinctive charac- ter simply from the numerical preponderance of the one term of the antithesis over the other these are the proper construction materials of a science.

As it has been with resemblances and contrasts, so has it been with causes.

The theocratic philosophy of history predicated for all events of consequence a single cause, namely, the Divine Purpose. Then came metaphysicians such as Hegel, who detected behind history the Idea striving to realize itself, and Cousin, who sup- posed each nation to embody a particular idea, so that war is simply the violent collision of Antagonistic Ideas. Akin to this is the theory of a national or racial "genius," which so domi- nates all the individuals of a given nation or race that they cannot think or act save conformably to it. Even today large vague terms such as "Christianity," "democracy," and "evolu- tion" are constantly used as if they stood for primary history- making forces.

When sociologists, emerging at last from the metaphysical into the positive stage, began to come upon real and ultimate forces, they erred by recognizing only a few large causes. Envi- ronment is a true factor, but who nowadays would take continents as unit areas of characterization, as did Guyot, Draper, and Buckle? It is now perceived that within the four corners of a country are several distinct milieux, each sculpturing the souls of its denizens in its own way. Race is a true factor, but instead of definite race-areas Latin, Teutonic, Slavic identified broadly with the domain of a particular family of nationalities or lan- guages, we have come to recognize in the European population three ethnic types, mingled in every conceivable proportion and crossed in every possible way. The individual is a true factor, but there is little of value in the Great-Man theory, which sets up a Hero for each epoch or movement and subjects multi-