CHAPTER VII 



BIOLOGICAL CONDITIONS: RACE AND 



GEOGRAPHY 



The Problem of Race 



/^NYONE entering upon a discussion of Taine's familiar formu- 

 /-^ lation of the three sources — Race, Environment, and Time 

 -^ J^ — which combine to produce man's 'elementary moral 

 state', and hence indirectly his works of art, is faced with at least 

 two major handicaps. First, these three concepts, even today, are 

 only imperfectly understood, and their many subtleties are still the 

 subject of much study and discussion. Second, the entire formula, 

 but especially the theory of Race, has had serious political conse- 

 quences for our time; all too often the tool of misguided or vicious 

 propagandists, it was used in Nazi Germany to justify genocide, 

 that unspeakable social crime of our generation. Only a knave 

 or a fool could approach such a complex subject without some 

 moral qualms and a feeling of 'rushing in where angels fear to 

 tread'. 



Leo Spitzer, whose Essays in Historical Semantics include explora- 

 tions of the concepts of 'Race' and 'Milieu and Ambiance', 

 states the latter aspect of our problem as follows: 



'For Taine's deterministic creed there was needed only a dash 



of the German philosophy of idealism [Freiheit in der Notwendigkeit: 



"freedom of development within the given pattern of the racial 



will"), and of organology {^^geprdgte Form die lebend sich entwickelf), 



for the race philosophy of the Third Reich to be born. It may be 



stated that the definition of "race" given by the most violent 



German fanatics . . . differs from that of Taine's . . . only in the 



degree to which the racial element in every member of the race 



is made the exclusive criterion . . . : Taine at least allowed for the 



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