Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/261

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 247

Theodectes of Phaselis, cited by Strabo, said the same: "The sun colors the head of men with a somber hue of soot and curls their hair by its burning heat."

The theory of Hippocrates, apart from the richness but incor- rectness of observations, contained in germ all the development which later, through Lamarck, 6tienne Geoffrey, Saint Hilaire, Goethe, and their school, ripened into the doctrine of biological transformism, through the influence of the environment and through hereditary transmission of variations produced by the ex- ternal environment. This doctrine of transmission by heredity of acquired characteristics has only in these later years come to be seriously questioned, notably by A. Weismann in his essays upon Heredity and Natural Selection, etc.

Herodotus (484-405), with a scientific training less extensive and less thorough than that of Hippocrates, though still strongly imbued with the theological beliefs of his epoch, is subject in his historic works to the trend of the conceptions of the natural- ists of his time. With the Bible and all antiquity, he believed in moral heredity, but this heredity of good and evil was divinely ordained. The influence of environment appeared to him always as a natural factor. "The most delightful countries produce ordinarily only weak and effeminate men, and likewise the soil which bears the most beautiful fruits produces men of indolence." 1

On the contrary, the social conception of Plato (430-357) is idealistic, subjective, and anthropocentric. To him the natural character of the individual determines the nature of the state:

The character and customs of a state are in each of the individuals who compose it. It is from man that they are passed into society. It is ridiculous to pretend that this impassioned energy which one attributes to the people of the North as the Thracians and the Scythians, that this taste for instruction which one can believe natural to the inhabitants of our country, and that this love of gain which characterizes the Phoenicians and Egyptians, are not in the indi- vidual before being in the state. 2

Thus is affirmed in the essays upon social science which the civilization of Greece has bequeathed to us this absolute antago- nism, which in sequel continued during a long time, and still

1 Book IX. 'Republic, Book IV.