Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/269

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 2$$

to dwell where formerly the Greeks dwelt. Climate should no longer be a question ; I hope I shall not be annoyed by this question any more.," He denied with reason the absolutism of the climate, but what does he put in its place ? Another absolute idea the absolute spirit, which develops successively in history. The thesis, unity, is the spirit of the immobile Orient. The antithesis is the spirit of classic antiquity. It is variety. The synthesis is realized in the Germanic peoples. It was there, however, under its metaphysical form, one of the sources of origin of the evolutionist conceptions. Idealism evolves and develops from Hegel himself. With Kolb, Klemm, Lazarus, and Steinthal, we see it bordering upon a psychology of peoples upon a collective psychology, which by degrees comes to be founded upon natural and experimental psychology. The latter, on its side, takes at this moment for a basis the study of races. It is from this standpoint, at first equally absolute, that Jodl in Die Kulturgeschichte, ihre Entwicklung und ihr Prob- lem (Halle, 1878), denies the influence of climate.

In the environment and the race there are then two terms of the problem. They are present, though no longer as formerly, by right of elementary units, man and soil or climate, but as masses, as every modern sociological problem. The question still reflects the dualistic and exclusive aspect. From their side, Conrad Hermann 1 and Lotze in his Mikrokosmus continue the anti-rationalistic school and end in the organic conception of societies. This analogy, at first purely formal, between societies and the organisms, assumes with A. Schaffle and Lilienfeld a more and more real character. 2

Finally Gumplowicz seeks to put an end to the antagonisms of the system and to the anthropological theory by affirming, under the name of realism, the unity of nature and of mind, and the absence of liberty of the latter. In evoking only the races, he conceives as one, mind and matter, man and his habitat. Fall- ing back into a new mysterious absolute, no longer individual,


 * Pkilosophit der Geschichte, Leipzig, 1870.

2 A. SCHAFFLE, Leben des socialen Korpers, Tubingen; LILIENFELD, Gedanken fur Socialwissenschaft der Zukunft, Mitau.