808 SOCIOLOGY 



The influence of physical environment on social organization 

 and activity has long been a moot question. The contrast be- 

 tween materialism and idealism is as old as the Politics and the 

 Republic. Is man the creature of contour, soil, and climate; or 

 is he the master of his fate? The Physiocrats and Montesquieu 

 gave materialism an impetus which brought it well into the cen- 

 tury. Comte's interest in the subjective phase of social evolution 

 diverted his attention largely from the objective. The rapid de- 

 velopment of natural science, toward the middle of the century, 

 again brought to the fore the naturalistic interpretation of social 

 and individual differences. Buckle, Guyot, and Draper pushed 

 this view to an extreme which seemed to make the continuity of 

 natural forces from beginning to end not only complete but rela- 

 tively direct. Buckle, for example, represented the "aspect of 

 nature" as stamping its effect upon a people in an immediate and 

 easily perceptible way. 1 The careful researches and inductions 

 of geographers like Ratzel and Ripley, and the contributions of 

 the Le Play school in France, have led a reaction against the theo- 

 ries of the direct influence of nature on society. Le Play and his 

 followers insist that environmental influence is mediated in an 

 indirect and complex way through a long hierarchy of conditions, 

 activities, and institutions, beginning with place and ending with 

 the rank of the society in the scale of civilization. Vignes states 

 the main thesis of the school to be that nature determines work 

 and reward, which in turn mold the society and differentiate its 

 population. 2 Demolins in recent volumes has illustrated the Le 

 Play theories concretely as applied to the creation of different local 

 types in France, and as explaining the leading racial groups of the 

 world. 3 A similar tendency is observable in the United States, 

 where scientists like Shaler and Brigham, historians like Hart and 

 Turner, geographers like Ripley and Miss Semple, and sociologists 

 like Giddings, have been at work upon the problem of environmental 

 influence. The general tendency away from the idea of immediate 

 effects toward the theories of influence exerted indirectly through 

 social institutions is attributable largely to the increasingly important 

 part which sociology is playing, not only as a science, but as a social 

 philosophy which affects all the social sciences. 



The idea of social progress was fundamental with all the phil- 

 osophers of history. Whether spiral as with Vico, or rectilinear 

 as with Condorcet, the path of human advancement was not to 



1 Buckle, History of Civilization in England, 2d ed. (New York, 1863), vol. i, 

 pp. 85 ff. 



2 Vignes, La science sociale, d'apres les principes de Le Play (Paris, 1897), 

 pp. 57-63. 



3 Demolins, Les Franfais d'aujourd'hui (Paris, 1898); Comment la route 

 cree le type social (Paris, 1901). 



