Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/271

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 257

obstacles could prevent the commodities, the most distant products, from reaching the place across seas, rivers, and mountains.

If all of these great theorists, instead of fruitlessly attempt- ing to construct superficial systems, and instead of the expendi- ture of enormous ingenuity in formulating them, had worked a little in comparative and elementary statistics, bearing upon economic phenomena and upon their relations to population, they would have ascertained that, without its being the only fac- tor, the physical environment, and particularly the climate, exer- cises an important influence upon the economic and genesial life, and consequently upon the ensemble of societies. Their adver- saries would also have ascertained that a certain influence is equally exercised by the anthropological factors. Unfortunately, there is an inevitable tendency in the human mind to consider things upon the surface rather than to resign itself to studying them at the beginning.

In fact at the present time the question is presented to us by the philosophy of history, i. e., by the schools in reality meta- physical, but which attach themselves more directly to positive sociology in the following manner. On the one hand, the meso- logic school, properly speaking, accords to the different environ- ments, including the alimentary, a preponderant, if not an absolute, influence upon the distribution and evolution of the human species. On the other hand, the principally anthropological , ethnological, and psychological school attributes this same abso- lute influence particularly to the races.

It is incontestable that the common tendency in both is to connect themselves more and more with the conclusions of the natural sciences, including biology, psychology, and sociology. The evolution of the several schools, from Hippocrates down to the nineteenth century, can leave no doubt in that regard. Comte and Spencer have only followed the scientific movement in attempting to co-ordinate and complete it through sociology.

The laws of structure and of the development -of the human species can never be required in any a priori formula. The laws were borrowed from the sciences, most directly in connection with social science, biology, and psychology, not from the most