Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/500

496 one believing in the uniformity of nature, but it is denied that the mind is able to peer through the darkness of the past and see the hidden workings of forces in the soul of humanity.

Historians have been loath to acknowledge frankly this limitation, and instead have promulgated various theories to account for human phenomena without even a tacit assumption of ignorance. They would prove that history has been caused by universal forces, cognizable by man, and that man is an automaton, tossed hither and thither as the forces of the cosmos have acted upon him. To this end social evolution has often been likened to the life of a living organism and the resemblances are sufficiently remarkable. It is influenced by its environment; it has its separate parts with their functions; blood vessels and nerves are not lacking; and the cells are the individuals of which society is composed. The simile is a very happy one, but it remains a simile.

Misled by the resemblances, historians have often sought to carry over into their field of inquiry the methods of the biologists, hoping thus to silence forever the denunciations of inexactness and to establish causation in their science in the same way as it is done by the investigations of the life of the lower animals and plants. According to this theory, the cosmic causes of the varying phenomena among people are to be sought in their physical environment. In the ultimate analysis, natural variations must be derived from the same source, for "we can not regard any nation as an active agent in differentiating itself. Only the surrounding circumstances can have any effect in such a direction." Yet as far as the historian is concerned these national varieties are the most important facts in his knowledge and the ultimate explanation of many events in the world's history. As Mr. Symonds says,

History has to accept this dissimilarity of peoples with all its results, for an unproved hypothesis should not form the foundation of its method.

Closely connected with the above is the still unsolved problem of heredity. Is not heredity one of the great causes of variation among men and hence an important factor in the production of historical movement? This question, to which I shall return later, must be answered in the affirmative by the historian, to whom the differences between individuals and between nations are conspicuous characteristics of his phenomena, and as far as his information reaches are due to the accidents of birth as well as to environment.