Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/270

 256 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

but collective, whose enigma becomes more and more indecipher- able with the mixture of civilizations, he ends in a fatalism and an immobilism no less redoubtable than that of the physical environment considered as exterior. There is no longer prog- ress. Sociology having for its object only natural groups and not individuals, everything for him centers in the struggle of races. The issue of the combat is always the same. The most powerful ethnical element prevails, since the influence it exer- cises is always and everywhere civilizing. This group assimilates the production of another. It divides the labor, it favors intel- lectual culture, and it forms races. And always one of the two civilizations ceases to exist. It disappears before barbarism, which recommences the process, but upon a larger scale, which shows higher collectivities, and better equipment in every respect, from the social and national point of view. And the result of this process ? Some groups triumph, affirming that it is prog- ress; others lament, pretending that it is regress and decadence. Surely, it is neither the one nor the other. It is always the same thing. 1

This philosophy, called realistic by Gumplowicz, but better termed subjective-collective, is only one of the numerous and rash deductions which sociology has been thought to authorize in harmonizing itself with the theories of Darwin. It is also a pessimistic adaptation with certain variations, more or less brilliant of the similar, but much more serious, theory advanced by Gobineau in his remarkable Essay upon the Inequality of Human Races, published in 1854. Gobineau denies all influence of cli- mate upon historic development. He makes development depend entirely upon the different mixtures of blood of the races. For him, central civilization is always located where there

lives at a given moment the most purely white group, the most intelligent and the strongest Should this group, through a concurrence of invin- cible political circumstances, come to reside at the foot of the polar ices or under the rays of fire of the equator, it would be there only that the intel- lectual world. would exist. It is there that all of the ideas, all of the tenden- cies, and all of the efforts would never fail to converge, and no natural


 * Za butte des races, p. 345 (French translation).